Christian Boltanski – Animitas (blanc), 2017

Using a variety of media, Christian Boltanski gives an account of ordinary lives — his own, but also the lives of anonymous people — individual and collective life stories. His work brings buried memories into the open, from the most intimate, personal, ordinary, family memories to the most universal of all, such as the great disasters of history and their impact on humankind. Heaps of clothes, the interplay of light and shade, the projection of images; these are some of the means Boltanski has used to preserve ‘lesser memories’, to express the precariousness of human existence and the fragility of passing time.

Invoking ancestral rites, Christian Boltanski creates memorials for the living and the dead. Filmed in a single, fixed shot from sunrise to sunset, Animitas (blanc) features 800 Japanese bells swaying in the wind, their tinkling evoking “the music of the stars and the voice of floating souls”. The bells are fixed to the ground on slender stalks and mark out a star chart of the day the artist was born, September 6, 1944. Doomed to disappear with time, the installation connects Christian Boltanski’s personal history with the stories of the places that host it. The first version of this installation was set in the Atacama Desert (Chile) in 2014, and subsequently on Île d’Orléans (Quebec), in 2017. Animitas (blanc) is an invitation to meditation and a reflection on the cycles of life.