Céleste Boursier-Mougenot Takes Clinamen Outdoors for the First Time

For the first time in its nearly three-decade history, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's sound installation clinamen is being presented outdoors. From September 26th to December 5th, 2026, hundreds of white porcelain bowls will drift across three circular pools at the renovated Onassis Mandra in Athens, colliding softly to produce an ever-changing aquatic score.

The move marks a reversal for the French artist, who had long refused the idea. "People wanted to put it outside. I said no. It's an indoor piece," he explained during the press preview in Athens, which designboom attended.

Clinamen first appeared in 1997 and has never existed as a fixed installation. Water, porcelain bowls, circular basins, and gentle currents set the vessels in motion, and every presentation produces a different configuration, sound, and rhythm. More than twenty iterations have followed the original work, each adjusted to the architecture and acoustics of its host. Previous versions have floated through the grand interiors of Paris' Bourse de Commerce – home to the Pinault Collection – and New York's Park Avenue Armory.

In Athens, the biggest variable is no longer the building around the work. Exposed to the conditions of the city center, the bowls now share their soundscape with shifting sunlight, wind, voices, traffic, birds, footsteps, and potentially rain. The setting is Onassis Mandra, a surviving Belle Époque outdoor theater located beside the Onassis Library and Dionysiou Areopagitou.

"It needs to be perfectly balanced," Boursier-Mougenot said of the work's relationship with its surroundings. "It has to be perfect when there is no wind, no rain. And then if suddenly the breeze comes, it's going to be perfectly balanced."

A passing gust can alter the movement of the bowls. A change in light can transform the appearance of the water. Rain adds another layer to the composition. The title refers to the Epicurean concept of the clinamen – the unpredictable deviation in the movement of atoms – and this idea of small departures governs how the installation operates.

Each porcelain bowl was individually selected by Boursier-Mougenot for its particular timbre, so every collision contributes a slightly different sound. As the bowls approach, separate, and meet again, they produce delicate, bell-like tones without any performer present. There is no score and no fixed sequence. The movement of the water continuously generates the sound.

The artist traces this interest in movement back to his early relationship with music. "I was fascinated by the movement, by the gesture, by the action, to produce sound," he noted. "The only message I want to convey is an invitation to inhabit a space that I have designed especially for them."

Because the city remains audible around the pools, the installation never sounds the same twice. Weather becomes a collaborator: a sudden shower adds its own rhythm to the bowls moving across the water.

Chance, the artist says, runs through his wider practice. "Many of my works have been made by coincidence," he shared during the preview. "It's crazy. I have many, many stories to tell."

In Athens, clinamen puts that principle to a new test, surrendering to an outdoor environment variables that previous, indoor presentations could largely control – and extending the work's run at Onassis Mandra through December 5th, 2026.