Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (b. 1961, Nice, France) lives and works in Sète. His works, which have been presented in contemporary art venues in France and abroad over the last 30 years, may be considered above all as those of a musician. After being the composer for author and theater director Pascal Rambert’s company, Side One – Posthume Théâtre, in Paris from 1985 to 1994, Boursier-Mougenot began to give an autonomous form to his music by creating art installations. He designs devices or environments that extend the notion of musical score to heterodox configurations of materials and media, using the most diverse situations or objects to manifest their sonic potential and generate spontaneous, live aural forms. Deployed in relation to the architectural or contextual frame of the exhibition spaces, each device provides an invitation to a listening experience in which sound-generating processes are delivered to the gaze and understanding of the visitor.

Among Boursier-Mougenot’s most representative series of works are: “clinamen” (1997 – ongoing), circular basins filled with water in which ordinary porcelain bowls chosen for their timbre drift, gently collide, and produce chiming sounds; “from here to ear” (1999 – ongoing), aviaries designed as ‘bird territories,’ in which visitors interact by their simple presence and movements with Australian finches who fly, perch, or hop on amplified electric guitars, thus concretely generating an abstract rock composition; “offroad” (2014 & 2019), an uninterrupted ballet of three grand pianos rendered mobile by the artist, and whose pursuit of, flight from, and occasional collision with, one another create a spontaneous piano score; and more recently, in 2026, “envolée,” a large circular stainless-steel gantry supporting eight swings, each of which rings a church bell as visitors swing, creating a peal.