clinamen | Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

“I’m interested in giving shape to the sensations of visitors, while offering direction and space to daydream. The only message I wish to convey is an invitation to inhabit a space that I have designed just for them,” says Céleste Boursier Mougenot.

A visual artist, musician, and composer, the award-winning French artist has for decades been exploring the boundaries between art and everyday life. Instead of writing music in the classical way, he creates living systems out of objects, water, movement, and space. The simplest materials are transformed into unexpected musical instruments that produce sounds in real time, without human performer intervention.

In the installation, hundreds of white porcelain bowls float freely on the water, following the flow of a gentle current. They approach, drift apart, and collide softly, producing delicate, crystalline sounds. Every moment is different, and every small collision opens up a new version of the work.

Boursier-Mougenot first developed "clinamen" in 1997. The title of the installation comes from Epicurean philosophy and describes the unpredictable deviation in the movement of atoms: a small swerve that makes room for chance, freedom, and the unexpected.

Each time it is presented, "clinamen" adapts to the architecture and atmosphere of the space that hosts it. In Athens, it is not simply transferred but re-tuned to the sound of the city and to the shifts in weather and light under the Attica sky. Visitors are invited to stand within a landscape of water and sound, to listen, to observe, to let time flow differently. As an ode to celebrate the “reverie,” the listening, and the contemplation. And if it rains, the sound of the rain will become part of the score.

With "clinamen", the renovated Onassis Mandra introduces itself to the public anew, bringing back into focus the only surviving open-air Athenian theater of the Belle Époque: a historic space next to the Onassis Library and Dionysiou Areopagitou. There, the installation transforms the space into an open invitation to listen and pause, inviting us to surrender to an almost addictive experience of reflection and daydreaming.

"clinamen" has been presented, among other venues, at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, the Victoria National Gallery in Melbourne, SFMOMA in San Francisco, the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

• The work “clinamen” did not always have its present form. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot conceived its first version in Paris in 1997 and presented it that same year at the CAPC Musée de Bordeaux. Since then, the work has evolved through more than twenty different versions, each entering into dialogue with the specific space in which it is exhibited.
• The work has no beginning, middle, or end. It functions as a constantly evolving sonic environment in which no two visitors hear the same thing. Every small collision creates a new sonic condition, making each moment of the exhibition unique.
• The artist has individually selected each bowl according to its particular timbre and the sound it produces when it resonates or collides with the others.
• The water temperature in the pools is maintained at approximately 30°C to enhance the creation and transmission of sound.
• Before porcelain bowls became the central objects of the work, Boursier-Mougenot experimented with everyday objects, toys, pieces of wood, and small musical instruments, even a ukulele.
• “clinamen” enters into dialogue with a broader tradition of works that use chance and the behavior of living systems as creative tools. It has been associated with John Cage’s ideas of indeterminacy, Brian Eno’s generative musical structures, and artists who explored the relationship between order and chance, such as Marcel Duchamp and Hans Haacke.
• In an interview at ‘Park Avenue Armory,’ Boursier-Mougenot explains that he is interested in “making sound itself visible.” He is not concerned with representation or narrative, but with creating the conditions in which sound is produced and revealed before the viewer.
• The visual and sound installation has been described by ‘Artforum’ as “an almost sacred encounter with art and nature,” while the ‘Observer’ called it “a 21st century urban Giverny: serene, elegant, [and] a refuge from the clamour of the contemporary world.”

“A 21st-century urban Giverny. Calm, elegant, [and] a respite from the stridency of the contemporary world.”

- Observer

“A delicate choreography of sound and movement.”

“The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.”

- designboom

“In life, discoveries like that can make you uneasy. Or resigned to a degree resembling freedom. Or both. And this seems to be the kind of surrender that Boursier-Mougenot aims for in his listeners.”

- The New York Times

“Α meditative symphony of contact.”

- Surface

“The bowls request that you stop and pay attention.”

“The clinks of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s floating bowls are just loud enough to evoke natural phenomena, just loud enough to point out what we stand to lose.”

- Black Star Reviews

“What’s fascinating is that the piece can transport you. Sometimes it carries you somewhere, and you stop noticing where you are.”

- The Cultivist

“The bowls become the instruments of a symphony without score or interpreter, a work in perpetual evolution, where music is born from the moment, from the interactions between matter, movement, and space.”

- Art Majeur

“A Zen orchestra without musicians, a musical score composed of found objects, or a chance-driven performance event.”

- NGV