via: mougenot
Notes:
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s artistic process explores the relationship between sound, sculpture, installation, movement, and experimental composition. Trained as a musician and composer, he approaches the exhibition space as an active environment rather than a place for presenting static objects. Instead of composing music with a predetermined beginning and ending, Boursier-Mougenot creates systems capable of producing sound through movement and chance. In clinamen, porcelain bowls float across pools of circulating water, gently colliding and generating delicate resonant tones. Although these encounters appear spontaneous, the artist carefully establishes the physical conditions that allow them to occur. His process creates a thoughtful balance between artistic control and unpredictability, where the artist constructs the system but does not determine every sound that emerges.
This approach is also evident in his installation from here to ear, where zebra finches inhabit a gallery environment containing amplified electric guitars. As the birds land on the instruments and move across the strings, their natural behavior produces an evolving arrangement of sounds. Boursier-Mougenot carefully tunes the guitars, organizes the space, and establishes the technological framework, yet the birds ultimately determine the rhythm and sequence of the composition. In this sense, the artist becomes a designer of conditions rather than a traditional composer. The work challenges conventional ideas of authorship by allowing living organisms, technology, movement, and chance to participate in the creative process. Visitors also become part of this environment because their presence can affect the birds’ movements and, consequently, the sounds produced.
What makes Boursier-Mougenot’s process particularly compelling is his ability to transform ordinary actions into experiences that encourage concentrated observation and listening. Water circulating, porcelain touching porcelain, and birds landing upon guitar strings become subtle events worthy of sustained attention. Sound functions almost like a sculptural material, changing according to movement, distance, duration, and the physical characteristics of the exhibition space. His installations demonstrate that an artwork does not need to remain fixed to maintain a strong conceptual structure. Instead, Boursier-Mougenot establishes carefully designed situations in which chance, sound, movement, material, and time become active collaborators. The resulting work is continually changing, allowing each viewer to encounter a composition that exists temporarily and may never occur in precisely the same way again.
- RJG//AI