henri chopin

Till the 23rd of January you can see some of Henri Chopin’s very beautiful works on paper in Berlin at Supportico Lopez in Kreuzberg.

Henri Chopin was born in Paris in 1922 and died in England in 2008. During the 1950s Chopin started to work with sound on his first portable tape recorder, soon loosing interest in the simple human voice and replacing it with more primitive human sounds, working on their manipulation by experimenting with current technologies. Chopin’s interest focused on all possible variations of the human voice, seen as an action and “language” of the body. He discovered that the inside of a human being carries with it a form of primordial poetry that he decided to express in the form of ‘concrete poetry’. Chopin was also a painter, graphic artist and designer, typographer, independent publisher, film-maker, broadcaster and arts promoter.

Chopin spent a lot of time in Naples from the beginning of the 1980s due to his collaborative projects with Peppe Morra, founder of Fondazione Morra, one of the most renowned spaces for contemporary art active within the city. Morra and Chopin worked closely together up until the final years of the French artist’s life. During this time they produced numerous publications, a large number of which were based on his stunning production of “typewriter poems”. Chopin found a new possibility for poetry both within sound and the written form; with a formal approach he constructed a new alphabetical narration that actually had no responsibility for communication.

In 1957 Chopin founded “Cinquième Saison” a sound poetry magazine that for many years would be a point of reference for artists worldwide. In 1964 “Cinquième Saison” becomes “Ou cinquième Saison” and with this name he published an amazing series of vinyls dedicated to international sound poetry and worked together with international contemporary artists and writers such as Jiri Kolar, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Phillips, Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs.