A day before Global Stress Awareness Week, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s sound and visual installation clinamen invites us to experience a moment of calm at the newly renovated Onassis Mandra. Welcoming thousands of visitors since its presentation, clinamen opens its doors on Sunday, 1 November, free of charge and without the need for a ticket. Follow the sound, the water and the movement. This may be the pause you need.
Presented everywhere from the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris to New York’s Park Avenue Armory, the installation continues to captivate Athenian audiences. Three circular pools. Water in motion. Hundreds of white porcelain bowls floating freely on the surface. They drift towards one another, move apart and collide gently, producing delicate, crystalline sounds. An unpredictable musical composition unfolds, offering a brief respite from the rhythm of everyday life.
For the first time, the remarkable clinamen takes on a new dimension outdoors, surrendering to the shade, the breeze, surrounding voices, ambient sounds and the echoes of Athens, as well as to the forces of nature and changing weather. It finds its home in the city’s only surviving open-air theatre from the Belle Époque, becoming a work that effortlessly rewards the time we give it.
“I am interested in giving form to visitors’ sensations, offering them direction while also leaving room for daydreaming. The only message I wish to convey is an invitation to inhabit a space I have designed especially for them,” says Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.
An acclaimed French visual artist, musician and composer, Boursier-Mougenot has spent decades exploring the boundaries between art and everyday life. Rather than composing music in the traditional sense, he creates living systems of objects, water, movement and space. The simplest materials become unexpected musical instruments, generating sounds in real time without the intervention of a human performer.
Boursier-Mougenot first developed clinamen in 1997. The installation takes its name from the ancient Greek concept of parenklisis, a key term in Epicurean philosophy describing the unpredictable swerve in the movement of atoms: a subtle deviation that makes room for chance, freedom and the unexpected.
Each time it is presented, clinamen adapts to the architecture and atmosphere of its surroundings. In Athens, it is not simply relocated but attuned anew to the city’s soundscape, the shifting weather and the changing light beneath the Attic sky. Visitors are invited to immerse themselves in a landscape of water and sound, to listen, observe and allow time to flow differently. And should it rain, the sound of the falling drops will become part of the score.
With clinamen, the renovated Onassis Mandra introduces itself to the public anew, bringing back into focus Athens’ only surviving open-air Belle Époque theatre, a historic site beside the Onassis Library and Dionysiou Areopagitou Street. Here, the installation transforms the space into an open invitation to listen, pause and unwind, drawing visitors into an almost hypnotic experience of contemplation and daydreaming.
clinamen: A closer look at Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s immersive sound installation
clinamen has not always taken the form we know today. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot conceived its first version in Paris in 1997, presenting it that same year at CAPC Musée de Bordeaux. Since then, the work has evolved through more than twenty different iterations, each engaging in a dialogue with the exhibition space that hosts it.
The installation has no beginning, middle or end. It functions as an ever-evolving sound environment in which no two visitors hear exactly the same thing. Every gentle collision creates a new sonic event, making each moment of the experience unique.
Each bowl has been individually selected by the artist for its particular timbre and the sound it produces when resonating or colliding with the others. The water in the pools is maintained at approximately 30°C to enhance the production and transmission of sound.
Before porcelain bowls became the central elements of the work, Boursier-Mougenot experimented with everyday objects, toys, pieces of wood and small musical instruments, even a ukulele.
clinamen belongs to a broader artistic tradition that embraces chance and the behaviour of living systems as creative tools. The work has been associated with John Cage’s ideas of indeterminacy, Brian Eno’s generative musical structures, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Hans Haacke, who explored the relationship between order and chance.
In an interview with Park Avenue Armory, Boursier-Mougenot explains that he is interested in “making sound itself visible”. Rather than focusing on representation or narrative, he creates conditions in which sound is generated and revealed before the viewer.
The installation has been described by Artforum as “an almost sacred encounter with art and nature”, while The Observer called it “a 21st-century urban Giverny: serene, elegant, a refuge from the clamour of the modern world”.
About Céleste Boursier-Mougenot
Born in Nice, France, in 1961, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot lives and works in Sète. His work, exhibited at contemporary art venues in France and internationally over the past three decades, can be understood primarily as the work of a musician.
From 1985 to 1994, he worked as a composer for Side One – Posthume Théâtre, the Paris-based theatre company of writer and director Pascal Rambert. He subsequently began giving his music an autonomous form through artistic installations.
Boursier-Mougenot creates mechanisms and environments that expand the notion of a musical score into unconventional compositions of materials and media. Drawing on a wide range of situations and objects, he reveals their sonic potential and creates spontaneous, living acoustic forms. In response to the architectural or conceptual context of each exhibition space, every installation becomes an invitation to an auditory experience in which the processes of sound production are made visible and perceptible to visitors.
Among his most representative bodies of work are:
clinamen (1997–ongoing): Circular pools filled with water, in which ordinary porcelain bowls, selected for their distinctive timbre, float and gently collide, producing bell-like sounds.
from here to ear (1999–ongoing): Aviaries conceived as territories for birds, where visitors interact through their mere presence and movements with Australian finches that fly, perch or hop on amplified electric guitars, generating an abstract rock composition.
offroad (2014 and 2019): An uninterrupted ballet of three grand pianos made mobile by the artist. Their pursuit, separation and occasional collisions create a spontaneous piano score.
envolée (2026): A large circular stainless-steel structure supporting eight swings, each of which strikes a church bell as visitors swing, creating a collective sound of pealing bells.
Onassis Mandra
Located beside the Onassis Library on Amalias Avenue, at 2 Dionysiou Areopagitou pedestrian street, and close to the Cavafy Archive on Frynichou Street, Onassis Mandra is an active hub for culture and expression.
The site houses Athens’ most representative surviving example of Belle Époque open-air theatre architecture: an outdoor stage dating from 1909, belonging to the mandra theatre typology, with a rudimentary auditorium and an Italianate stage. Older Athenians knew the venue as Athinaikon, the Theatre of Hadrian’s Gate and the German Theatre, the latter name referring to the German operettas that once enjoyed great popularity there.
Onassis Stegi × 0fr. Paris Shop
Discover a curated selection of objects and publications born from the collaboration between Onassis Stegi and 0fr. Paris, the independent bookshop and publishing platform with a presence in Paris, Tokyo and Seoul.
The specially designed shop features tote bags, caps and publications, alongside collectible porcelain bowls created exclusively through the strategic partnership between Onassis Stegi and IONIA, inspired by the works at the heart of the installation.
United by a shared passion for discovering and presenting artists and books, Onassis Stegi brings 0fr. Paris to Onassis Mandra in Athens as part of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s clinamen. The collaboration fosters meaningful connections between Athens and a wider international cultural network.
Open throughout the installation’s run, the 0fr. Paris bookshop in Athens presents a curated selection of books published or edited by 0fr. Paris, alongside exclusive editions and limited-edition objects created specifically for the collaboration. In parallel, a selection of Onassis Publications titles will be available at 0fr. Paris bookshops in Paris, Tokyo and Seoul, introducing the Foundation’s publishing programme and artists to new international audiences.
** clinamen by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot**
Sunday, 1 November 2026
Admission: Free
Opening hours on 1 November: 11:00–14:30 and 17:30–21:30
Onassis Mandra, 2 Dionysiou Areopagitou, Plaka, Athens
The installation runs until 5 December 2026.
Regular opening hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11:00–14:30 and 17:30–21:30.
