Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective’s sprawling Arles installation offers haunting world view

Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective have opened “Correspondences” at Luma Arles in southern France, billed as the project’s first major European presentation and running until November 8. Installed in the 5,000 sq. m La Grande Halle (a former railway engineering workshop built in 1894), the exhibition presents all eight films created between 2023 and 2026, plus two new commissions, alongside Smith’s drawings, photographs, handwritten texts, and archival installations made for the site. The multi-channel installation ranges across locations including Chernobyl, Greenland, the Black Sea, Siberia, and the Camargue wetlands near Arles, and invokes figures such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Medea, Alfred Wegener, Peter Kropotkin, and Andrei Rublev. Smith described the work as addressing ecological crisis and the artist’s responsibilities while drawing on the site’s historical resonance, as the area formed part of the Alyscamps necropolis.

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