Arles Drawing Festival 2026: Christian Boltanski Screening

📍 Saint-Anne Church, Place de la République, Arles

▪️ iDzia installation : the video, the sound

Art and Moving Image at the Arles Drawing Festival 2026

In spring 2026, the city of Arles hosted a new edition of the Drawing Festival, an event dedicated to contemporary drawing and its many forms. At the heart of Place de la République, the Église Sainte-Anne was transformed into an exhibition space, where heritage, projection and drawings engage in dialogue throughout the visitor's journey.

In this spirit of openness and experimentation, the festival asserts a clear ambition: to make drawing a living language, capable of resonating with places, images and audiences.

A Festival on the Rise

This fourth edition of the Arles Drawing Festival, running from 18 April to 17 May 2026, is held under the honorary presidency of Éric Cantona. Under the artistic direction of Frédéric Pajak, the event takes over various heritage sites across Arles (churches, museums and private mansions) weaving itself into the artistic identity of a city traditionally defined by photography, and proposing drawing as another, complementary and deeply sensitive way of looking at the world.

Alongside the major collective exhibition Viva l'Italia !, the 2026 edition features around forty exhibitions exploring a wide range of artistic universes. The event has established itself as a significant cultural and festive occasion, animated throughout its run by debates, guided tours, workshops, screenings and concerts.

An exhibition at the heart of the festival's ambitions

The exhibition Et la vie continue… dessins de la collection Karmitz (And Life Goes On… Drawings from the Karmitz Collection) unveils for the first time a remarkable selection from the personal collection of Marin Karmitz, a filmmaker, producer and exhibition curator. Nearly 150 drawings and prints were drawn from this private collection and presented within the Sainte-Anne Church, forming a thematic journey marked by the fragility of paper and the silence of line.

Presenting over a hundred works by reputed artists (Géricault, Goya, Giacometti, Otto Dix, Victor Hugo, Andy Warhol, Paula Rego, and others), the exhibition reveals the coherence of this eclectic collection, built around the central work of Christian Boltanski.

Animitas (blanc) by Christian Boltanski: the exhibition's focal point

Animitas (blanc) is a 2017 video projected in the choir of the church. This ten-hour film, shot in a single take from sunrise to sunset, shows 800 Japanese bells arranged across a snow-covered landscape. Within the refined space of the building, the work stands as a narrative pivot, embodying, in the words of Marin Karmitz, "a breaking point between life and death" within the exhibition's journey.

This contemplative atmosphere, both visual and sonic, deepens the meditative quality of the space, while the chiming of the bells evokes "the music of the stars and the voices of floating souls." In this light, the curatorial choice becomes a tribute to Christian Boltanski, who was a close friend of the curator.

Our audiovisual expertise in service of art

iDzia acted as the audiovisual technical provider for the diffusion of Christian Boltanski's centrepiece installation. Our role involved designing and deploying an audiovisual system suited to the constraints of the venue and the intentions of the scenography, bringing together image, sound and architecture.

By working on both the projection and the sonic environment, we fully integrated the installation into the solemn space of the Sainte-Anne Church. This project reflects our approach to audiovisual scenography: treating technical expertise as a tool for interpreting artworks and spaces, in service of the visitor's experience and the enhancement of heritage.