A Life with The Great Animal Orchestra

Fondation Cartier commissioned a documentary film about the life’s work of soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, to go along with their audiovisual exhibit in museums around the world.

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the art museum and patron of the iconic jewelry house, commissioned Sho Shibuya to create a poster for a documentary film by Vincent Tricon that details the life of Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist. The film dovetails with a multimedia exhibit, also commissioned by Fondation Cartier, called The Great Animal Orchestra, which gives audiences an abstract, immersive audiovisual experience of his recordings.

Bernie’s story, as the film shows, closely tracks with the broader story of climate change and ecological collapse. His work, capturing audio recordings of wild habitats over the years, grants the listener a dramatic, visceral experience of nature struggling against humanity. But, in a cruel twist of fate, it was nearly all lost in a wildfire — climate change itself coming to erase the evidence we have of climate change’s impact on natural ecosystems.

Sho invited me to help develop a concept for the poster that shared the spirit of his iconic New York Times paintings, where the canvas provides so much context, but that would be uniquely relevant to the film and Bernie’ broader legacy. Instead of a newspaper, we selected the front page of a symphony Bernie scored that includes recordings of actual wild animals, reminding humanity where our music came from in the first place. Sho then painted a gradient similar to his sunrises, but this time depicting a dark, ominous blaze, representing the wildfire obscuring and destroying the physical recordings Bernie had captured over the years — a dramatic moment in the film. As a whole, the poster is meant to serve as a reminder and warning of the fragility of the world.

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