Patti Smith & Soundwalk Collective Spotlight Climate Change in “Correspondences”

Patti Smith is a global cultural icon who, for more than 50 years, has exerted her influence on music, literature, and the visual arts—even as she maintained her commitment to human rights and to ending the global climate crisis.

In the last decade, while working on other projects, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and National Book Award winner has been collaborating with a charismatic Frenchman she met by chance aboard a trans-Atlantic flight. (He was reading a book of poems by Nico, whom Smith had known, and the two got to talking.) That Frenchman is Stephan Crasneanscki, the founder of Soundwalk Collective, a creative enterprise with Simone Merli to collect sound from around the world and develop sonic projects in artistic collaborations. Crasneanscki has worked on art and film projects for Chanel and Louis Vuitton, along with luminaries across media, like Philip Glass, Nan Goldin, Jean Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Werner Herzog.

Smith and Crasneanscki spoke with W on the occasion of their blockbuster presentation at Kurimanzutto gallery in Manhattan through Feb. 22 of “Correspondences,” an exhibition that both considers and calls out the havoc humans have wreaked on our planet and on other species—but does so in a free-associative manner that pulls from narrative film, documentary, music, literature, and philosophy.

The centerpiece is 111 minutes of their eight highly produced short films built visually around field recordings Crasneanscki collected—from places of poetic inspiration, historical significance, and ecological urgency. Playing one after the other across several wide walls, the gallery transforms into an immersive soundscape.

Particularly effective are the videos that include music by a children’s choir from Chernobyl (the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history) and Smith’s incantations of all the species that have gone extinct since her birth in 1946—plus the names, years, and acreage destroyed from all the destructive wildfires that have raged since then as well. (She and Crasneanscki told me they plan to add the names of the Los Angeles fires that raged on, even as they spoke.)

Beyond the soundscape, the exhibition includes drawing, installation, photo-based work, and an assemblage of natural objects. Smith’s often ascemic handwriting is scrawled on the frames of a triptych, and on many of the images on view throughout. Just minutes before the show’s opening night in New York, with lines around the block in frigid weather, Smith stood calmly drawing and writing with her candy-striped pencil on images that had already been installed on the walls of the gallery.

The presentation of “Correspondences” is the first in New York—and the first where elements of the collaboration are being offered to collectors through a commercial gallery. Smith and Crasneanscki have presented versions of “Correspondences” in past years all over the world: live performances, museum exhibitions, film screenings, poetry readings, and workshops, including at the Venice Biennale and Brooklyn Academy of Music. They talked to W in New York before hitting the road again.

Patti, how has this collaboration between you and Stephan worked?

Smith: He gets materials and sound from all over the world. I can’t travel like that. So he brings the shards of rocks and stone and dirt and the sounds of his travels. It might be an hour of the sea and then the swirl of a storm on the sea, or coyotes and wolves in the coldest winter. And then I improvise.

Stephan, are you like the Alan Lomax of the 21st century, but for sound instead of music?

Crasneanscki: Yes, thank you! We share a great love in the act of field recording, though I’m often recording sound that’s not necessarily musical or human-made like his. But in my recordings I often recognize a musicality that inspires both Patti and me. When I travel the world, I’m looking for some resonance, some correspondence with my conversations with her. The sound becomes the first layers of what we do.

Patti, I know you revel in free association and improv. You’ve talked about “the joy of moving through the process of discovery.”

Smith: Well, that’s our whole life. That’s what we do: there’s a door, we open it up and walk in and see what we can find. If you wanted to use a word like “shamanistic,” William Burroughs used to tell me that about myself; the way that I would channel whole worlds by studying or looking at something, and a story would come into my mind. That’s how I’m able to improvise so quickly.

Switching gears, Patti, we are talking in the hours now before the second inauguration of Donald Trump, who has promised to make sweeping changes that will cause setbacks to many of the issues you raise in your work, including here in “Correspondences.” What do you want to see from other artists and from the avant-garde right now?

Smith: It’s too big of a question for me. I don’t project what I think other people should do.

As a fan, then, what are you looking forward to in 2025?

Smith: I’m waiting for the new Lana Del Rey album. I’m looking forward to Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. And Gerhard Richter has a big museum show coming up, I think at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. He’s my favorite artist—I met him! I went to visit him in Cologne.

Crasneanscki: I would go for the Richter too.

Smith: We’ll go together.

Patti, what about fashion? In your film Dream of Life, there’s this funny moment where you suddenly tap every garment on you and sing out “Prada! Prada! Prada! Comme des Garçons!”

Smith: People keep asking me “Who are you wearing?” so that was me just kidding around. People think because I don’t wear makeup or I don’t do this or that, that I’m anti fashion. But I’m high fashion-friendly.

What book or movie or experience shifted your thinking in an important way around climate?

Smith: Darren Aronofsky’s movie Noah (2014). I did a song for it. It was god seeing human beings destroying the planet...and needing to jumpstart everything again. It’s really an environmental movie.

Stephan, I’m wondering whether you’re a fan of two novels I loved that took on ecology through fiction: The Overstory by Richard Powers and, more recently, Daniel Mason’s North Woods?

Crasneanscki: Yes, both are strong books and really touched me. For nonfiction, Björk, when I saw her last summer, turned me on to the brilliant Timothy Morton: very contemporary, radical, and absolutely right on the spot. I’ve been reading everything. And recently I reread Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. That book sparked the environmental movement in the ’60s; what strikes me now is how this denying force still is a block to progress. I spend time in the Amazon or Greenland or the Sahara and I see, and hear, firsthand what’s happening. It’s dramatic: the destruction and the catastrophe.

In New York, lines have been around the block for “Correspondences.” Where can W readers catch the next iterations?

Smith: We are performing this month where “Correspondences” is on view now in Colombia at the modern art museum in Medellin [through February 15] and at GAM Santiago de Chile [through May 15].

And that kicks off your performance tour of South America—Buenos Aires, São Paolo?

Crasneanscki: Yes, and then more exhibitions in Asia at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and at Piknic Seoul in spring. In Europe, we’re also working with the Fondation Cartier in partnership with the Triennale museum in Milan to bring our work there next year.

Will this project ever be done?

Smith: It won’t be done.

Crasneanscki: That is like asking us to stop talking! [Laughs.]

Smith: Our goal is for people to see it all over the world.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.