The Brooklyn Rail

Rebels, saints, and martyrs. Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith’s collaborative show CORRESPONDENCES has them all. An immersive experience weaving together visual and sonic elements with references to the murder of queer radical Pier Paolo Pasolini and filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s meditation upon religious revelation, not to mention imagery of environmental catastrophes ranging from nuclear meltdowns to mass extinction, Correspondences feels more like a damascene rite of passage than gallery exhibition. However, make no mistake, Correspondences is neither eulogium for the dead nor doomsday prophesizing; rather, it is a testament to art’s capacity both to transcend tragedy and summon solidarity in defiance of it.

Exhibited for the first time in New York and outside of institutional settings,Correspondences is an ongoing, ever-evolving body of work, a decade-spanning creative dialogue between Smith and Soundwalk Collective’s founder, Stephan Crasneanscki, encompassing videos, sculptural installations, works on paper, and audio recordings. In this show, several two-channel videos play simultaneously, accompanied by a soundtrack of ambient recordings taken in the field and overlaid with recordings of Smith’s own incantatory recitations. Among them, The Acolyte, the Artist and Nature, (2023–24) and Medea (2024) incorporate appropriated footage from Tarkovsky and Pasolini’s oeuvres, respectively. Profound explorations of faith and mythology in its own right, Smith and Crasneanscki’s use of the auteurs’ footage—and the decision to screen them concurrently—gestures towards a more nuanced, though no less revelatory, conceit at work, a double meaning revealed in the show’s title. A correspondence can be a form of exchange between parties—the nature of the Smith and Crasneanscki relationship, for example—but it also can speak to a more keenly experienced affinity, a kinship felt in the marrow, down to the bones.

The latter is the case with Smith and her lifelong connection to Pasolini—the poet is namechecked in the liner notes to Smith’s 1978 album Easter. Included in Correspondences are two large-scale vitrines, Cry of the Lost | Prince of Anarchy and Pasolini | Medea (both 2024). Bringing together works on transparent paper, featuring illustrations in China ink, tape transfers on glass, black-and-white reproductions of found images—many of them newspaper clippings and photographs—accompanied by Smith’s handwritten text, the cases feature prominently Pasolini’s savage murder in 1975, including graphic crime-scene images of the poet’s mutilated and partially burned corpse. As Smith intones mournfully in “Pasolini,” a 2024 recording produced in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, “He lays in the sand / In his white shirt / Like a swan in the dust.”

A more sacred, embodied form of correspondence—communion—is summoned in Le Jardin de l'Âme (2024), a sculptural installation which calls to mind ritualistic neolithic stone circles. Situated on the gallery’s floor, black or white canvases adorned with sinuous lines and script hand-drawn by Smith are anchored by—and in one instance, placed flat beneath—ragged black obsidian rocks featuring polished disc-shaped impressions carved onto their surfaces. The overall effect evinces a sense of entering a consecrated space. Reminiscent of Rudolf Steiner’s “Blackboard Drawings”—illustrations and script composed on blackboards by the nineteenth-century Austrian spiritualist while giving lectures on anthroposophy, an esoteric belief system he founded—Smith’s canvasses evoke the scribblings of an entranced oracle, rapidly writing down what is being conveyed before they slip away. That is to say, messages from the divine.

Yet, the most profound revelations in Correspondences are not to be found in Smith and Crasneanscki’s brushes with the ineffable and their efforts to convey them, or in their manifest adoration for the radical and visionary artists whose work has so inspired them. Rather, it is in their capacity to chart the fundamental compact which exists—that very universal correspondence—between tragedy and resilience, joy and pain. Nowhere is this more evident than in another of the show’s two-channel videos, Children of Chernobyl (2024). Filmed in black and white, tracking scenes float through Chernobyl’s Red Forest and abandoned structures reclaimed by nature, a landscape emptied of human presence following the infamous nuclear disaster. As the film draws to a close, a youth choir begins to sing. The meaning is manifest. From amidst even the greatest destruction, nature can return, the human spirit renewed. After all, there is no greater correspondence which unites us than the one between life and death.