Glass presents the first in our online series on meditative art installations from across the world
ANIMITAS is a permanent installation by French artist Christian Boltanski commissioned by Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh in 2016. Installed on a small island within the duck pond of the sculpture park, the work consists of some 200 small Japanese bells and clear tags attached to delicate metal “stems” planted into the ground. The bells have been positioned to reproduce the constellation of the stars that were visible in the sky on September 6, 1944, the night that Boltanski was born.
Christian Boltanski, Animitas, 2016. Courtesy of Jupiter Artland.
Photograph: Allan Pollok Morris
The concept for the artwork originated in Chile in 2014, when Boltanski observed the small shrines that were placed on roadsides to honour the deceased. With the assistance of a local indigenous community, the artist found an isolated patch of land in the Acatema Desert where he installed hundreds of bells and scattered flowers amongst them in reference to the altars that inspired the work.
Of this first iteration of the Animitas series, Boltanski has said, “I think we are surrounded by ghosts and they are materialised by these bells. It is indeed the music of the sky. I was interested in making something rudimentary in this place. At first, I thought of working with the observatories. They were magnificent, but I also found them intimidating and they scared me. I wanted to find the simplicity, the softness of the sound of a small bell.” The installation has since been replayed in a number of environments which include a forest on the island of Teshima in Japan (2016), the snow-covered landscape of Île d’Orléans in Quebec (2017) and the Dead Sea in Israel (2017).
Christian Boltanski, Animitas, 2016. Courtesy of Jupiter Artland.
Photograph: Allan Pollok Morris
Born in Paris in 1944, Boltanski’s childhood was marked by the Holocaust and postwar era. Much of the artist’s oeuvre is openly concerned with notions of identity, absence and remembrance. Often working with transient materials such as archive photographs, newspaper clippings and discarded clothes, the artist explains that “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, Animitas, 2016. Courtesy of Jupiter Artland.
Photograph: Allan Pollok Morris
In Japanese tradition, slips of paper are attached to bells offered at Shinto shrines to communicate the prayers of supplicants. It is believed that every time a bell rings, the wish attached to the bell is carried by the wind into the spirit world. Traversing the mythologies of East and West, Christian Boltanski’s installations of Animitas have been captured through video, thereby offering viewers from a multitude of locations and cultures the means of partaking in a resonantly collective human experience.
by Rowena Chiu
Christian Boltanski’s installation Animitas (2016) is on permanent display at Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh