In 2014 Christian Boltanski installed an artwork in the Atacama Desert in Chile, Animitas, the first in a series of iterations featuring 800 small Japanese bronze bells on individual stems of various heights, arranged to mirror the position of the stars on the night of Boltanski’s birth. Animitas in Chile is the name for the roadside shrines created to commemorate the departed. The Atacama Desert is a high-altitude location featuring international observatories, and in this desolate landscape, the bells chime in a cacophony of sounds Boltanski describes as “music of lost souls.” The site is also significant as Chileans who lost loved-ones under the Pinochet regime, come to this place believing their remains were buried here.

Animitas is poetic, elegiac, and features Boltanski’s characteristic use of simple and ephemeral materials that correspond to working with the themes of memory, loss, birth and death, the transience of human existence. Speaking about his creative process, Boltanski said, “‘What I try to do with my work is to ask questions, talk about philosophical things, not through stories with words, but stories through visual images. I talk about actually very simple things, common to all. I don’t talk about complicated things. What I’m trying to do is to remind people to forget that it’s art and think about it as life.”