Music / Patti Smith in Athens in a special performance

As expected, when Patti Smith takes on a project, she does so with a care and reassuring tenacity that few artists possess. It’s been almost 48 years since her legendary ‘Horses’, that unforgettable debut with Patti’s menacing guitars and haunting timbre, an album that anointed her as the archetypal poet of the New York punk rock scene and put her on all the must-see lists. top names of the alternative rock scene. The opening of ‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’, the sweeping cover of Them and Van Morrison’s well-known track, remains thrilling to this day. From the cultured punk minimalism of “Horses” and the avant garde pursuits that followed in the following decades, Patti Smith’s path is written in golden letters, as she is a musician who mixes many different musical styles without hesitation. Her next record releases include the albums ‘Radio Ethiopia’, ‘Easter’ and ‘Wave’. Her records influenced a whole generation of poets, intellectuals and musicians. Patti Smith also defined an entire generation of women, bringing an urban culture and counter-establishment perception that would leave behind the last remaining representatives of the mid-70s hippie movement, centering on the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, subverting any given aesthetic to the sensuality and sexual provocation brought by singers emulating Blondie’s Debbie Harry.

A unique collaboration coming to our parts

Patti Smith collaborates with the contemporary sound art platform called Soundwalk Collective and will appear on the Roof stage in a two-day event full of images and sounds from contemporary reality. “Correspondences” is an ever-evolving artistic proposal that has completed more than a decade of life and crosses places and spaces to discover traces of poets, filmmakers and revolutionaries, even emphasizing the danger of climate change. The Soundwalk Collective, and especially its founding member Stefan Krasneadski, have explored and recorded the world’s most geographically distant sounds as sonic memory trackers, bringing to light stories of the surrounding world, our relationship with the world and the environment, the soul of our existence but also the creative process of the artist. St. Krasneadsky, searching for the sounds, created a soundtrack of an invisible film. But the project would be incomplete if it did not meet the poetic vision of Patti Smith. This collaboration began by chance, during a meeting on a plane, and took shape after continuous conversations to reflect on life and nature. The musical pieces that will be presented on the Main Stage of the Roof will be audio-visual journeys and their theme will include an idiosyncratic exploration of the destructive effect of human interventions on the oceans. The work also refers to the resilience of nature after the Chernobyl disaster, to the decentralized societies envisioned by Piotr Kropotkin, and to the wildernesses of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Last Night. In “Correspondences” Stefan Krasneadski will perform together with Patti Smith, while the visuals of the show have the signature of the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Maia.

Soundwalk Collective has previously collaborated with the late director Jean-Luc Godard, photographer Nan Goldin, choreographer Sasha Walz and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. Patti Smith writes music and tours non-stop, offering photographs, drawings and visual installations to galleries and museums around the world. In fact, she was honored in 2020 with the coveted US National Book Award for her bestselling autobiographical book titled “Just kids”, where she chronicles her deep friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorne and their creative journey. At the same time, she offers support to human rights issues and environmental groups, mainly to the Non-Profit Organization Pathway to Paris, which she founded to provide tangible solutions to combat climate change.