céleste boursier-mougenot turns bourse de commerce into immersive aquatic soundscape

an Immersive aquatic soundscape at THE Bourse de Commerce

The Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris transforms into a mesmerizing aquatic and musical landscape with the unveiling of clinamen, an immersive installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. On view until September 21st, 2025, and curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Pinault Collection, the large-scale project envelops visitors in a multisensory experience where porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement. At the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water. This vast, tranquil surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky visible through the museum’s iconic dome. White ceramic bowls drift across its surface, propelled by gentle currents, producing unpredictable melodic chimes as they serendipitously collide. 

While this is not the first iteration of clinamen—earlier versions have been staged at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Centre Pompidou-Metz—it is the most ambitious to date. ‘This exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date,’ Céleste Boursier-Mougenot tells designboom. The museum’s architecture played a pivotal role. ‘My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work,’ the artist notes,‘I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ.’ Encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome, the Rotunda offers a rare resonance.‘The immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension,’ Boursier-Mougenot says.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, clinamen v.10, 2012-2025 | all images courtesy of Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, unless stated otherwise

embracing unpredictability within the clinamen installation

Like many of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works, the Bourse de Commerce installation exists at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and performance. It also marks the culmination of decades of experimentation with sonic systems that operate independently of human control. A musician by origin, Boursier-Mougenot approaches sound as a ‘living material’—as seen in clinamen, where the traditional constraints of music are shed, replaced by a self-regulating system that breathes and changes with each passing moment. ‘My systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms,’ the artist explains. 

The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random, unpredictable motion of atoms. For Boursier-Mougenot, this idea mirrors the elemental operations at play in the installation. ‘The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation,’ the artist says. He sees the installation as ‘a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears.’ The inherent unpredictability is central to the experience: ‘if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.’

clinamen takes over the iconic Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce

enveloping visitors in a multisensory experience

Boursier-Mougenot deliberately embraces unpredictability in his creative process, a practice he discovered when allowing external sounds to enrich his compositions. This openness led him to ‘think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.’ This philosophy informs the entire structure of clinamen, which runs on a self-regulating system akin to a living organism. The materials, too, are deliberately fragile and mutable. Porcelain, water, sound. ‘It was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe […] that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago,’ he recalls. Clinamen beautifully embodies a tension between apparent opposites: order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. The artist’s previous work, harmonichaos, which involved vacuum cleaners playing harmonicas, explored similar themes of unpredictable, self-regulating systems. ‘With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another,’ he shares, highlighting the interplay of chance and inherent system logic.

In a culture defined by acceleration and distraction, clinamen invites a radical slowing down. Visitors become part of the installation simply by being present. ‘With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence,’ he says. ‘The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.’ Ultimately, clinamen is not only a meditation on matter, motion, and sound, but a quietly profound call to attention. ‘I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world,’ Boursier-Mougenot admits, ‘but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.’ Read our conversation with the artist in full below.

porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement

INTERVIEW WITH Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

designboom (DB): How did the architecture of the Rotunda in the Bourse de Commerce shape this version of the clinamen?

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (CBM): My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work. I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ. In this way, many of the installation’s parameters can be redefined by the characteristics and particularities of the venue. At the Bourse de Commerce, the immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension.

DB: The immersive installation has been shown before, but never at this scale. What new possibilities—or challenges—did this larger format bring?

CBM: You’re right, this exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date. At this stage, no one can say for sure whether everything will work as usual on this scale. It’s a challenge, with a multitude of technical issues to resolve in order to remain faithful to the work and its simplicity. To achieve this, I’m working with a team of excellent technicians, and it’s only at the time of the tests that we’ll know if everything is working. So it’s quite experimental, as I think any attempt at art should be.

DB: The title clinamen refers to the random motion of atoms in Epicurean physics. How does this idea connect to the movement and behavior of the installation?

CBM: Clinamen, this word and its definition came to me in the summer of 1997, as I was leafing through the pages of a dictionary. I was looking for a title for my new installation that would describe the principle of the work. I had the word declination in mind and was looking for a synonym here and there. The cosmic connotations of clinamen immediately captivated me and I found many analogies between the phenomenon it describes and my work in progress. So I adopted the title. Shortly afterwards, in view of the installation’s appearance, the title clinamen seemed a little pretentious, and for the work’s first exhibition I called it untitled. In the years that followed, untitled enjoyed great success in France and abroad in many different versions. Around 2003, production of the inflatable swimming pool model I had been using came to an abrupt halt. I had to design my installations with floating porcelain by having raised floors made into which one or more round pools could be integrated. Later, for exhibitions in vast spaces without walls, the raised floor took the form of a platform with access ramps and surrounded by circular benches, virtually acting as walls. As versions of the installation became larger and more planispheric, I decided in 2012 to rename the largest of them clinamen.

The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation. For materialists, the clinamen is the minimum angle that leads atoms, those inseparable and eternal particles, to collide and assemble to produce, by aggregation, all the perishable matter of our world, which constantly disintegrates and reformates : atoms are to matter what the letters of the alphabet are to language and writing, and it is from the variety of their combination that everything exists. In my work, there is also a curved movement that leads the cells represented by the porcelain bowls to collide, producing a world of sounds and potentially all the occurrences of the elements present. We can contemplate clinamen installation as a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears. But if you try to trace the causal thread of a sequence, it’s impossible to do it live. In other words, if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.

image © designboom

DB: The piece is guided by invisible currents, where ceramic bowls create sound through chance encounters. How do you work with unpredictability as part of your creative process?

CBM: I discovered the virtues of unpredictability for my music the day I accepted that outside sounds, totally unrelated to my own, such as those of the urban environment of the unspoilt place where I was producing my music, could mix with it and enrich it. Later, during a play by the company whose music I was composing, which was being staged on the roof of a campus building, the sounds of cars in the distance or the sound of the wind could be heard. The sounds of cars in the distance or voices, wind, planes passing in the sky and crows flying overhead mixed with my music for a noisy string quartet and reanimated it. It was all a question of sound levels and permanence of course, but it gave a “here and now” quality to my recorded and broadcast music. Later, I often used microphones to pick up sounds live outside theatres, reinjecting them and mixing them with my music. These experiences opened my ears and gradually led me to think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.

DB: Your choice of materials—porcelain bowls, water, currents—feels deliberately elemental. What draws you to these fragile, mutable mediums?

CBM: One day, Jack, a friend of mine who’s a piano maker, said to me: the piano is a collection of different materials – metal, wood, felt, glue, etc. – which can be dangerous to each other, and which are also subject to phenomenal mechanical tensions capable of destroying them. Fortunately, the ingenious arrangement of these materials results in an almost living object that only awaits the tension of the pianist’s nervous system to become the alter ego of the player.
For my part, it was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe (inflatable pool, soft plastic, glass, porcelain, water, pump, electricity, heating element, etc.) that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago. In the field of art and installation, any object can be considered according to criteria that no longer have anything to do with its functionality.

image © designboom

DB: You’ve described sound as a ‘living material.’ How do you approach sound, not just as music, but as something sculptural, spatial, and physical ?

CBM: Rather, my systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms. As I relate with the harmonicaos work and the use of tuners immersed in a form of hesitation or doubt that I notice and exploit to thwart forms of off-putting repetition.

DB: There’s a tension in clinamen—between order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. How do you see these opposites coexisting in your work ?

It’s funny, towards the end of the nineties, I called an installation harmonichaos. It consists of thirteen silent vacuum cleaners, each of which plays a small diatonic harmonica, whose tonality, or tuning of the vacuumed notes, is different from the twelve other harmonicas. The operation and shutdown of each vacuum/harmonica module depends on a frequency analyzer built into the module. This is a chromatic tuner used by musicians to tune their instruments. It accurately identifies the sound frequency of a single note at a time, but its analysis becomes more than uncertain as soon as the device detects several notes or a chord simultaneously. The device reacts to surrounding sounds, hesitates, contradicts itself …
Observing this, I thought that a logic other than the one for which the device had been designed was at work, because the time division seemed “alive” to me. It was only a short step from there to imagining a specific form of life. I used the device because of its unreliability. With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another. Each module interacts with the twelve others in the ensemble ad libitum. What’s more, this low-tech system is disrupted by variations in the voltage of the electrical network feeding it, making any attempt at prediction even more highly improbable.

image © designboom

DB: Your installations often invite the audience into a sensory, open-ended experience. What role does the visitor play in activating or completing the work?

CBM: When you visit an exhibition, aren’t you yourself sensitive to the presence of other visitors? If they give you the impression of not knowing why they’re there? It can be funny, but it can also be pathetic. If they only look at the works through their cameras or smartphones, and step back without paying attention to the other visitors to frame a masterpiece, I think that’s awful. With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence. When I succeed in doing this, I find it makes people more beautiful… I’ve also noticed that when I compose the spaces of my installations using circles or curves, it makes visitors’ trajectories more harmonious and their wandering more fluid than in orthogonal spaces. The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.

DB: In an age of speed and distraction, how do you see your work offering space for slowness, attention, and contemplation?

CBM: I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world, I don’t presume to know what anyone needs, but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.

project info:

name: clinamen

artist: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot | @celesteboursiermougenot

curator: Emma Lavigne, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection

location: Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001, Paris, France | @boursedecommerce

dates: June 5th – September 21st, 2025

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