As 2021 begins, CIRCA presents a month-long programme by Patti Smith, inaugurating a new year with a series of poems, performances and reflections that consider renewal, remembrance and collective responsibility at a moment of profound global uncertainty. Appearing daily across Piccadilly Lights and online, the commission marks the beginning of CIRCA 2021 and a shift in focus from the crises of the previous year towards the possibilities, obligations and futures that lie ahead.

The programme begins at midnight on 1 January with a special performance by Patti Smith and her band, presented as a tribute to one hundred NHS and healthcare workers who lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Broadcast as the clock turns from 2020 to 2021, the performance transforms Piccadilly Circus into a site of collective remembrance, acknowledging the immense sacrifices that have defined the year while offering a gesture of hope towards the future. The choice is characteristic of Smith, whose practice has long combined personal reflection with public conscience, bringing poetry, music and political engagement into continual dialogue.

For more than five decades, Smith has occupied a singular position within contemporary culture. Emerging from New York’s downtown art scene in the late 1960s alongside figures such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg, she helped redefine the relationship between poetry and popular culture. Her landmark album Horses (1975) fused the immediacy of rock music with literary ambition, while her subsequent writings have established her as one of the most significant poetic voices of her generation. Throughout this trajectory, Smith has consistently returned to a belief in the transformative power of language, not merely as a means of expression but as a force capable of shaping public consciousness.

This belief underpins her CIRCA commission. Throughout January, poetry becomes both medium and message. New works, historical texts, performances and readings unfold across the month, creating an evolving programme that responds directly to contemporary events while placing them within longer histories of social change and collective action. In doing so, Smith draws attention to poetry’s original civic function. Long before it became confined to books or academic institutions, poetry served as a public form through which societies remembered, mourned, celebrated and imagined themselves.

The recurring work A New Year provides the conceptual centre of the commission. Written during a period of isolation and uncertainty, the poem embraces the symbolism traditionally associated with beginnings while resisting sentimentality. Rather than offering promises of easy renewal, Smith proposes a more active understanding of hope, one grounded in participation, responsibility and mutual care. The future, the work suggests, is not something that arrives fully formed but something collectively created.

This proposition expands throughout the month. On Greta Thunberg’s eighteenth birthday, Smith presents The Cup, a poem confronting environmental collapse and the accelerating consequences of climate change. On 20 January, coinciding with the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, she performs People Have the Power, the enduring anthem she co-wrote with Fred “Sonic” Smith in 1988. Accompanied by a montage celebrating activists, organisers and community initiatives, the work situates political transformation not within institutions alone but within the collective agency of ordinary people.

Taken together, these interventions reveal the underlying concerns that have animated Smith’s practice for decades. Questions of memory, activism, ecology, democracy and spiritual renewal recur throughout her work, united by an enduring faith in humanity’s capacity for reinvention. Even in moments of profound difficulty, Smith refuses cynicism. Her optimism is neither passive nor naïve. It emerges instead from the conviction that culture, community and imagination remain essential tools through which societies navigate periods of upheaval.

Presented at a time when public gatherings remain restricted and much of the world continues to experience isolation, the commission also reflects upon the changing nature of public space itself. By bringing poetry to one of the world’s most visible advertising screens, CIRCA extends a lineage that stretches from ancient oral traditions to contemporary mass media. Language ordinarily encountered in books or intimate performance settings is instead projected into the urban landscape, interrupting the rhythms of commerce with moments of contemplation, remembrance and possibility.

As CIRCA enters its second year, Patti Smith’s commission establishes a framework that is both poetic and political. Rather than asking audiences to escape the present, it invites them to engage more deeply with it. Across a month of words, images and performances, Smith reminds us that history is not simply something we inherit. It is something we participate in creating, together.

Patti Smith is one of the most influential cultural figures of the past fifty years. A pioneering artist, poet, musician, writer and performer, she transformed the relationship between poetry and popular music, forging a practice that continues to inspire generations across literature, visual art, activism and contemporary culture.

Emerging from New York’s downtown creative scene in the early 1970s, Smith became a defining voice of artistic independence through works that combine lyrical intensity with social consciousness. Her landmark debut album Horses (1975) remains one of the most celebrated records in music history, while books including Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award, have established her as one of the most important literary voices of her generation. Throughout her career, she has remained committed to the belief that creativity carries both personal and civic responsibility, using her work to address themes of freedom, justice, memory, environmental stewardship and human connection.

In January 2021, Patti Smith inaugurated CIRCA’s 2021 programme with A New Year, one of the platform’s earliest public commissions and a gift to London following a year defined by isolation and uncertainty. Broadcast from Piccadilly Lights at the beginning of a new year, the project combined poetry, performance and reflection while reaffirming the capacity of art to connect people across distance and circumstance. Alongside the commission, Smith released Our World, a series of four hand-signed editions drawn directly from her personal sketchbooks and dedicated to climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Awarded the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Smith’s influence extends far beyond music. Through a practice that moves effortlessly between page, stage and public space, she continues to demonstrate how art can serve as a force for imagination, compassion and meaningful change.