list.co.uk/festival Christian Boltanski | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART

Animitas

HEART

TO HEART

Christian Boltanski talks to Laura Campbell about his artworks at Jupiter Artland including Les Archives du Coeur, a growing archive of recorded heartbeats from across the world

L ow wooden steps are placed under the aperture through which we can watch Christian Boltanski’s Theatre d’ombres at Jupiter Artland. Children and toddlers clamber up and peer inside, delighted by the spectacle of dancing demons and ghouls projected into the darkness. Bring your gaze to the fore and you will i nd the source of the drama: a cast of crude forms bobbing limply as if from a baby’s mobile. Boltanski seems to be laughing in the face of death, and children are invited to share the joke.

When I meet the 71-year-old conceptual artist in the light of the courtyard, the place is mobbed. After walking a short way from the crowds, Boltanski surprises me by gesturing for us to sit on some muddy steps. He’s France’s most important living artist, but he’s not afraid of getting scuffed trousers during his show’s opening weekend. Neither does he seem phased by the prospect of a torrential downpour any minute straight down to the business of interviewing then.

‘We are twins. Not the same age, but we are twins,’ He laughs boyishly. Christian Boltanski was born on the 6th of September 1944, the year Paris was freed from Nazi occupation. He seems tired but cheerful and is sipping a double espresso, the saucer for which is sitting on the ground by his crossed legs. For Jupiter Artland, Boltanski has created a map of the stars as they were on his birthday with l exible metal ‘stems’ bearing Japanese wind-bells carefully plotted on an island within the park’s duck pond. For an artist preoccupied with notions of chance and identity, it seems both apt and silly to tell him that I too was born on the 6th of September. Using his birthday as a parameter for an artwork might seem self- indulgent, but Boltanski is known for using red herrings. ‘Everybody is so important, so unique, and yet at the same time so fragile,’ He explains, ‘everyone will be forgotten, will die and there is nothing we can do about this. The only thing to do is to remember.’ It seems

11–18 Aug 2016 THE LIST FESTIVAL 99