Events

Film in English with English subtitles / Film en anglais sous-titré anglais

Discussion in English | Discussion en anglais

About the series

Unearthing the Collection: American Narratives is presented by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Join Senior Curator Leanne Sacramone and embark on a journey through the soundscapes, skyscapes, and landscapes of American artists from the collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

About the film

Bernie Krause, A Life with The Great Animal Orchestra was produced by Fondation Cartier and is the first documentary by French filmmaker Vincent Tricon. Composed of unpublished archival footage and interviews filmed in California in 2021, A Life follows Krause through Sonoma County, where he lives with his wife Katherine. Snippets of Krause’s collected soundscapes examined in the film reveal that within any ecosystem, each species has its own acoustic niche and human activities are increasingly silencing these great animal orchestras. Part of the problem, notes Krause, is the increased alienation of human beings from the environment. Quoting American environmentalist Paul Shepard Jr., Krause states, “The further we draw away from the natural world, the more pathological we become as a culture,” adding with a smirk, “And, if you don’t believe that, watch the news.”

The film positions Krause as a brilliant figure who contemplates the natural world as a poet. It is at once an ode and an elegy – a celebration of sonic splendor and a solemn plea for change. On October 9, 2017 Krause and his wife lost everything to one of Northern California’s devastating wildfires. Their home, Wild Sanctuary, and all of their worldly possessions were destroyed, including countless recordings and field notebooks that represented 50 years of Krause's work on the ground. Footage of the couple visiting what barely remains of Wild Sanctuary serves as a chilling, personal account of the ruinous destruction caused by climate change, a poetic injustice suffered by a couple whose life’s work has been devoted to preservation.  

Speakers

Vincent Tricon is a French editor and film director who studied in the editing department at La Fémis, the French grande école. He served as film editor for Divines (2016) and Jessica Forever (2018). In 2017, he was nominated at The César Awards, France’s national film awards, for Divines (2016), directed by Houda Benyamina (The Golden Camera at Cannes Film Festival 2016). His fourth short narrative feature film, Sami la Fugue, was produced by Barney Productions in 2021. Bernie Krause, A Life with The Great Animal Orchestra is his first documentary.

Leanne Sacramone is currently Senior Curator at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. She joined the staff at the Fondation Cartier in 2001 and has since organized close to twenty exhibitions. She has notably contributed to making known on the French art scene the history of graffiti in Born in the Streets: Graffiti (2009), the art of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Beauté Congo-Congo Kitoko (2016) and the work of Latin American photographers in America Latina (2013). Leanne values the wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary programming of the Fondation Cartier, which has led her to collaborate with painters and sculptors, photographers, designers, comic strip artists, and thinkers. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, she has been based in Paris since 1992. She studied French Language and Literature at Smith College and Art History at the Ecole du Louvre and the Université Paris I Sorbonne.

More Information

Since 1968, Bernie Krause has traveled the world recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and environments large and small. Working at the research sites of Jane Goodall (Gombe, Tanzania), Biruté Galdikas (Camp Leakey, Borneo), and Dian Fossey (Karisoke, Rwanda), he identified the concept of biophony based on the relationships of individual creatures to the total biological soundscape as each establishes frequency and/or temporal bandwidth within a given habitat. His contributions helped establish the foundation of a new bioacoustic discipline: soundscape ecology. Krause has produced over 50 natural soundscape albums in addition to the design of interactive, non-redundant environmental sound sculptures for museums and other public spaces throughout the world. 

Commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain on the occasion of the related exhibition presented in Paris in 2016, the immersive installation The Great Animal Orchestra invites the public to enjoy an aesthetic meditation, both aural and visual, on the animal kingdom, which is increasingly under threat in today’s modern world.

At the initiative of the Fondation Cartier, Bernie Krause met London-based United Visual Artists who afterwards created a device able to provide a visual translation of the soundscapes recorded by Bernie Krause. 

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is a private cultural institution whose mission is to promote all fields of contemporary artistic creation to the international public through a program of temporary exhibitions, live performances and lectures. Created in 1984 by the Maison Cartier, the historic institution is located in Paris in a building designed by the architect Jean Nouvel. Fostering surprising and unexpected encounters between artists, scientists, philosophers, musicians and architects from around the world, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has over the years developed a program of distinctive contemporary art exhibitions on subjects ranging from science to cinema, dance to design, and has built a unique collection that brings together more than 2,000 works by 500 artists of 50 different nationalities. 

For more than two decades, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has engaged in projects that examine the role of humans in the living world. Full exhibitions, individual works of art, publications, performances and public talks, have explored the effect of human intervention, industrialization, on the natural world. 

The place

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This event will take place in the Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built at Reid Hall in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

For nearly 60 years, Columbia University students and faculty have come to study, teach, and pursue their research at Reid Hall, home to Columbia Global Centers | Paris. Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall also hosts several other Columbia University initiatives: Columbia Undergraduate Programs, M.A. in History and Literature, GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement the world over through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.

From graduate and undergraduate courses to webinars attracting audiences worldwide; from executive training to artist residencies, the Paris Center is a hub for scholars, students, and artists who cross both disciplinary and national boundaries alike. Through its public programs, the Center also addresses pressing global issues that are at the forefront of international education and research: agency and gender; climate and the environment; critical dialogues for just societies; encounters in the arts; and health and medical science.

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Columbia Global Centers | Paris or its affiliates.