it was totally impossible to preserve somebody. And you can not own somebody even if you have her heartbeat. This person is going to be a dead person as everyone. There are going to be a lot of heartbeats of dead people there. Heartbeat is a symbol of life and it carries the identity of a person, but it is just to remember the life of the person who now has disappeared. PT: It is not only about the heartbeats. If you think about a person that will, for example, inherit from her grandmother this archive number of her heartbeat. And he knows there is the archive in Japan and that he can actually go there. There is also the story of the Heart Archive that the grandmother told you about, which may be even more important. CB: I do very few works that can be shown in a gallery or that can be bought in private collections. Instead, I try to produce two types of works. One type of work is large installations which are destroyed afterwards but you can in a way “play” them again. For example, the piece called Chance in Venice is being destroyed but I am going to play it in Brazil and in South Africa. It will be not exactly the same, but it will be more or less the same. It can be played again like a symphony or a piece of music. Normally the art piece is like a relic. But in my work there is no more the idea of the relic, it is more like a partition of music or a musical score. And I have created this final piece called Personnes (image on pages 50–52) in the Grand Palais... I was travelling to Japan, Paris and New York, it was in Milan etc., but each time the piece is different. In Japan Personnes is going to be outside. It is also going to go to Brazil and South Africa and to the Netherlands, too. It is like playing a piece of music, but to play it in a different way, it can be played with a big orchestra or a small band… So this is one of the kind of pieces I am doing now. Another kind of work that I am doing now has more to do with mythologies or stories, but based on real, existing stories. One new piece has to do with Internet. Internet is a beautiful thing because you can touch people who are very far from you. I decided to create some kind of a magazine in the Internet that one can subscribe to. People can be inside the work with a very small amount of money, say, 10 euros per month. Then they are going to receive ten movies from me, each month. I am trying to touch 2000 or 3000 people during one year. It is a beautiful thing that if there is a student in India, he can have my work and participate in my work. There are no more galleries, no more art market. I hope I can touch as many people as possible everywhere. Then somebody who lives in a small city in Finland, and who loves my work, can have my work. And this is another way to create art and to touch people. PT: It was in the 1960’s and 1970’s that you have made videos and films last time? Then you were mostly dealing with portraying deep states of psychic and emotional distress.1 1 The Internet address of the this work entitled Storage Memory is http://www.christian-boltanski. com/eng/2/presentatio-oeuvre)
CB: Yes. But now it is more like an emotional diary. Yesterday I was in a hospital and I was filming the floor of the hospital. I can see the sun moving, or I am sad... It is like an indication about my life, but not a direct indication. PT: And you film them yourself, on video? CB: Yes, by myself. 42