The Iconic Patti Smith Has Been Curating Crisis As A Backdrop To Poetry

Recent visitors to the high-class Chelsea, New York, venue Kurimanzutto have been treated to a collaborative effort between Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective. Over the past ten years, Soundwalk Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki has been working with the American folk singer to isolate some of the world’s most intriguing modern dystopias and tragedies. Visiting poignant locations that carry stories rich in emotion and human meaning, Stephan and Patti have recorded the scenes and then layered in incredible verse as an artistic response. 

 

At the arts venue, eight short feature films were exhibited alongside sculpture, drawings, and collage to demonstrate some of the planet’s most heart-moving scenarios and stories. Themes of death, chance, and rebirth permeate starkly different aspects of human situation that demonstrate nature holds all the cards and we only have the illusion of holding our own. If we ask politely then nature plays the cards we want and if we’re rude and demanding nature can play a few new ones to teach us a lesson. Will we ever learn?  

 

The recent exhibition was called Correspondences and explored the polarity between the romantic culture imagination and the reality at our feet during the pivotal 20th Century. A documentary of failure and a human spirit that endures, real life recordings of ambient surroundings merge with captures of voice, response, and exclamation. Among the several videos presented, Children Of Chernobyl was one of the most talked about. The political situation in Ukraine is in the headlines a lot recently and it’s all one way. There is an entire community of people in that country who have difficult lives and their stories go beyond the battlefield.  

 

In the devastated and abandoned areas of Chernobyl, where the nuclear accident made the land radioactive, it’s not only wildlife and rare plants that have made a re-appearance. People, too, have unofficially moved in and begun to live as squatters on the unwanted plot. What draws them there and how do they live in the utter emptiness of the wasteland? This story is explored with a 15-minute video accompanied by Patti Smith who recites poetry as a response to her emotions. You can listen to the soundtrack on YouTube.
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