Christian Boltanski, Animitas

From May to September 2021, Christian Boltanski’s Animitas, a sound work consisting of 180 small bronze bells on steel stems, fills the Noguchi Museum’s garden with a “music of lost souls.” Boltanski’s extended video Animitas, La Forêt des Murmures (2016), which documents a permanent version of the work on the island of Teshima in Japan, is also on view.

The first incarnation of Animitas, a sound installation by Christian Boltanski (1944–2021), appeared in a remote part of the Atacama Desert in 2014. The name comes from the small roadside shrines to the departed found in Chile. In that desolate, high-altitude landscape, now a location for international observatories, Boltanski installed 800 small bronze bells suspended from steel stems of various heights arranged to mimic the position of the stars on the night of his birth. Twisting in the wind, the bells play a gently cacophonous “music of lost souls.”

The temporary version of Animitas installed in the Noguchi Museum’s garden is linked to a permanent example called La Forêt des Murmures (2016) on the island of Teshima in Japan by a day-long video of the Japanese installation on view in Area 4 of The Noguchi Museum. (On Teshima, in addition to walking through a ghostly forest of sound, visitors have the option to acquire a bell chime on which to engrave the name of a loved one and become a permanent part of the work.)