The genealogy of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's aquatic, immersive, multisensory installation, developed in over twenty versions over thirty years. Clinamen is published on the occasion of the installation of a monumental version of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's work in the Rotonde of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection during Summer 2025. "These blue islets, their surface dotted with floating white porcelaine emispheres, like the atoms of an endlessly renewed musical form - drifting, colliding, tinkling - have developped, reconfigured and expanded though space and time, from their appearance in 1997 at CAPC Musée de Bordeaux to more recent manifestations." (Emma Lavigne).
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's first visual works are part of his continuing experience as a composer. The artist then began to give an autonomous form to his music by creating installations. From the most diverse situations or objects, from which he extracts musical potential, he develops devices that extend the notion of score to the heterodox configurations of the materials and media he uses, to generate, most often live, sound forms that he describes as living. Deployed in relation to the architectural or environmental data of the exhibition spaces, each device constitutes the ideal framework for a listening experience which, delivered to the gaze and understanding of the visitor, reveals the process that generates music.
This book traces the genealogy of clinamen, an installation first conceived in 1997 by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot in her apartment on the 6th floor of a Parisian building and presented that same year under the name untitled (series I-1,2,3,4) at the Galerie Pour La Vie of the CAPC Musée de Bordeaux. The installation has since been developed in more than twenty versions, under different titles such as untiled (Series# 2,3, 4 & 5) from 1999 with the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York; variation / variação at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2009; variations at the Princessehof Porcelain Museum in Leeuwarden in 2017 and in 2021 for the inauguration of the CAFA Museum in Langfang, China; duplex at the Mario Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin in 2013, at the François Schneider Foundation in 2019 and for the public art project at 101 Collins Street in Melbourne in 2023; finally, around ten more monumental versions presented under the title clinamen starting in 2012 at the MoCA in Tokyo, at the National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne in 2013, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2015, in 2017 at the 14th Biennale de Lyon, at the Minsheng Museum in Shanghai and at the SFMoMA in San Francisco, in 2019 at the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, in 2022 at the Kadoc Chapel in Leuven, Belgium and in 2023 at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea.
