Animitas is a work by artist Christian Boltanski comprised of over two hundred small Japanese bells. Each bell is anchored in place on a long metal stem, planted on the island in Jupiter Artland’s Duck Pond. The bells chime in the wind, emitting what Boltanski described as ‘music of the souls.’

The bells are arranged to reproduce the map of the stars on the night the artist was born, 6 September 1944. Boltanski’s commemoration of his own life is joined by a dedication to remembering the lives of others – Animitas was intended to be a sonic counterpart to the Chilean tradition of ‘animitas’ memorial shrines. These shrines serve as homes for the souls of the departed that are visited and cared for by the living. Reverberating across the water, the bells chiming as the breeze moves them creates an enchanting sound.

The unveiling of Animitas was accompanied by a temporary installation of Boltanski’s Les Archives du Coeur (The Heart Archive), which invited visitors to enter a specially designed booth and contribute a recording of their heartbeat. The resulting audio files were then added to an archive of recordings housed on the Japanese island of Teshima.

Death, life, and identity were recurrent themes in Boltanski’s work, marked by an intention to archive and remember that goes beyond what is explicitly present. He frequently used fragile and ephemeral materials (old photographs, used clothing, personal and used daily items, newspaper clippings, letters) as evidence of the brevity of life.

‘What I try to do with my work is to ask questions, talk about philosophical things, not through stories with words, but stories through visual images. I talk about actually very simple things, common to all. I don’t talk about complicated things. What I’m trying to do is to remind people to forget that it’s art and think about it as life.’ Christian Boltanski

Biography

Christian Boltanski was a sculptor, photographer, painter, and filmmaker born in 1944 in Paris, France. He died in Paris in 2021. Boltanski’s childhood was marked by the post-war era and the Holocaust; his Ukrainian Jewish heritage, knowledge about his parents wartime experiences, and his own early memories impacted him significantly. Aged 12, Boltanski left school, began to paint and was focused on the ambition of becoming an artist. In the 1960s he began to develop a “personal ethnology” marked, among others, by the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Harald Szeemann. At the same time, drawing on museology, Boltanski exhibited inventories of items of anonymous owners. Boltanski’s work frequently uses objects (photos, pieces of clothing, bells, flowers) give voice to absent subjects and are an invitation to the viewer to meditate and contemplate.

Since his first exhibition at LeRanelagh cinema (1968) Boltanski’s work has been shown in numerous countries. Recent solo shows include at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019); Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, Japan (2019); The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan and the National Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2019); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2018); The Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2018); the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy (2017). He was recognised with several awards during his lifetime, including the Praemium Imperiale Award (2006) and the Kaiser Ring Award (2001). He participated in Documenta (1977 and 1972) and numerous Venice Biennales (2011, 1995, 1993, 1980, and 1975).