A longstanding artistic dialogue brings together Soundwalk Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki and musician-poet Patti Smith in their ever-evolving project CORRESPONDENCES. This expanding body of work spans films, archival material, collages, poems, installations, performances, and vinyl albums, each devoted to a different theme, including ecological disasters and climate change. Crasneanscki describes the collaboration with Smith as an ongoing conversation: his field recordings – an “archive of sonic memories” – form the starting point for Smith’s poetry.

Within the n.b.k. Billboard program, a work from the CORRESPONDENCES cycle titled Cry of the Lost | Prince of Anarchy is presented for the first time in public urban space. Visually, this audiovisual work evokes a multilayered collage, combining Smith’s writings, landscape photographs, satellite imagery, and research from the film archive of Jean-Luc Godard. Another central reference is Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), a natural scientist, philosopher, activist, and anarchist who advocated for a society free of violence and domination, and who became known as “the anarchist prince” due to his aristocratic origins. Smith’s poems Cry of the Lost and Prince of Anarchy – performed by the artist and accessible via QR code as audio recordings – add a further sensory dimension. This new multisensory work also previews the album CORRESPONDENCES Vol. 3, to be released by Analogue Foundation and Bella Union in early 2026.

CORRESPONDENCES has been presented in immersive exhibitions and live performances by Soundwalk Collective (Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli) and Patti Smith worldwide, including at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2025); Piknic, Seoul (2025); Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (2024–2025); Onassis Foundation, Athens (2024); Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum (2023).

Patti Smith (*1946 in Chicago, lives in New York) is a pioneering artist, poet, and musician who has created a cross-genre, cross-media oeuvre since the 1960s, inspiring generations of artists. Her album Horses (1975) – a milestone in music history that blurred the boundaries between poetry, punk, and rock – marks its 50th anniversary with a 2025 world tour. Smith has received numerous honors for her literary and musical work, including Officer of the National Order of the Legion of Honor (2022); PEN Literary Service Award (2020); International Ludwig van Beethoven Prize (2020); Austrian Honorary Decoration for Science and Art (2019); and the National Book Award (2010). Her photography, drawings, paintings, and poetry have been shown internationally and are represented in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Stephan Crasneanscki (*1969 in Grenoble, lives in New York) works across sound, image, and text in an interdisciplinary artistic practice. His long-term research often involves journeys that he maps through field recordings. His projects trace the legacies of figures such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Pyotr Kropotkin. In 2023, he released the book Medea in collaboration with Patti Smith and French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux. His research in the personal film archive of Jean-Luc Godard led to a photo book and the sound composition What We Leave Behind (Libraryman, 2021). Crasneanscki founded Soundwalk Collective in 2001 as an interdisciplinary platform for contemporary sound art. Since 2009, together with Simone Merli, he has produced concept albums, sound installations, and live performances, collaborating with artists, musicians, and filmmakers including Nan Goldin, Patti Smith, and Laura Poitras. The duo composed the score for Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed about Nan Goldin, which won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.