10/08/2024
Although DokuFest’s 23rd edition is slowly coming to an end, the film programming team has kept an ace (or a few) up their sleeve as a reminder that chaos can be endless, but so can the beauty of it all. Crowning the end of the special screenings for this edition, the legendary American punk rock icon Patti Smith – poet and important avant-garde figure of New York’s 70s music scene up to the present day – made a sonic appearance at Kino Lumbardhi through an eerie creative synergy with the Soundwalk Collective.
A joint collaboration between founder and artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli, Soundwalk Collective works with a wide range of artists and musicians to bring specific sound projects to life, exploring conceptual, literal and artistic themes. Established as a contemporary sonic arts platform, Crasneanscki and Merli’s multi-disciplinary approach introduces new possible spaces of collaboration for image and sound. In an engaging multisensory fashion, Soundwalk Collective creates new storytelling potentials for sound in art installations, as well as in other creative formats such as dance, music, and film.
In a special screening worthy of its name, the Soundwalk Collective presented excerpts from a wide range of short films accompanied by what was called “Patti Smith’s Correspondences”—a unique set of mumbo-jumbo poetry sung, whispered, and mumbled by the artist herself. Known for her powerful poetry filled with heavy religious and artistic imagery, Smith’s voice filled Kino Lumbardhi’s space for over two hours in what could only be experienced as a meditative trance-like moment of co-existence. Paired with unreleased original footage of Tarkovsky and Pasolini, as well as images unearthed from Jean-Luc Godard’s archive, Patti Smith opened the doors to her inner psyche with references to wolf cries, princes of tears, raging fires—everything and anything at once—in what can only be perceived as correspondence with the voices inside one’s head, the depths of the earth, and higher-spiritual beings that dwell in the cracks of one’s skin. With minimal musical accompaniment consisting of gongs, pipes, and laid-back synths, Smith’s voice echoed like a prophet bringing destruction and rebirth through the images on the big screen, reaching into the spaces between cinema seats.
By: Enxhi Noni
Photo: Elmedina Arapi
