Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s Meditative ‘Clinamen’ Is a 21st-Century Urban Giverny

In Paris, most things drifting in the water—say, in the Seine, or the Canal Saint-Martin—are none too poetic. But Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s calm installation provides an elegant counterpoint: Clinamen v10, on view through September 21, swirls placidly below the resplendent rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce. A shallow basin painted swimming pool-blue, eighteen meters in diameter, is filled with water in which white bowls float, guided by an invisible hydraulic water pump. As the gentle current propels the ceramics along, playfully jostling each other to create a faintly bell-like sound, serenity sets in around the blithe sensorial soundscape. The bowls circulate not in traffic and not as if choreographed—they’re reminiscent, rather, of the kind of languid repose of floating on one’s back. Curator Emma Lavigne, who is also general director of the Pinault Collection, described it as a respite from “the stridency of the contemporary world.”

She further likened the floating bowls to a contemporary version of Claude Monet at Giverny with the proliferation of nymphéas (water lilies) bobbing in the water. Boursier-Mougenot described the bowls as evoking a flock of sheep.

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Clinamen, conceived in 2012, is shown here at its largest iteration to date, at scale with the architecture of this site. The Bourse de Commerce was an 18th-century stock exchange, partly restored and partly redesigned during a major three-year transformation at the hands of Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Its glass-domed rotunda and original wraparound 19th-century mural are the venue’s crown jewels, below which is the core of the redesign, Ando’s vast and versatile 29-meter-wide, nine-meter-tall concrete cylindrical exhibition space. Staircases wrap around it, atop which visitors can circle a ringed walkway to view the space from above.

The word “clinamen” comes from Epicurean physics and, per the wall text, “refers to the random motion of atoms, a concept that resonates with the work’s inevitably changing and unpredictable nature.” (“Boursier-Mougenot has a weakness for overly clever titles,” Artnews once wrote.)

Clinamen has been floating around, so to speak, since 1997 when Boursier-Mougenot played around with filling up inflatable pools. A ten-meter iteration was shown at the Biennale de Lyon in 2017, hosted in a geodetic building masterminded by Richard Buckminster Fuller; before that, it was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2013.

Boursier-Mougenot worked closely with Lavigne ten years ago, when she was a curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz and he represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale. In the Giardini, the artist used low-voltage electrical currents to power a ‘mobile’ tree inspired by 18th-century parks and Italian Mannerist gardens. The artist had the French pavilion’s glass roof removed to freely allow in the elements. The same year, his exhibition in Paris, “Acquaalta,” was named after the annual flooding that affects the water levels in Venice. His work not only alluded to this phenomenon but also implemented it. When he took over spaces in the Palais de Tokyo, dark eerie waters unfurled across the cavernous rooms, through which visitors navigated in small wooden boats, while images of the public themselves—filmed by cameras in situ—projected back their movements against the walls.

Clinamen is posited as a kind of synesthesia, the phenomenon of when the brain routes sensory information to more than one sense simultaneously, and one can literally see timbres or hear visuals. In addition to his relationship with water—the artist is based in Sète, a Mediterranean-adjacent French port city in the Occitania region—Boursier-Mougenot has a strong relationship with music, having also worked as a composer heavily influenced by John Cage and Brian Eno, and Clinamen is a balm for the ears and eyes alike.

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