In the early ‘50s Henri Chopin threw all of his poems in a bag and then he burned it on the bank of the Seine: this was his first act of poetry. Founder of the Poésie Sonore movement, film-maker, publisher of Revue OU, sculptor, painter and typographer, this eclectic French poet was above all “an inner space explorer,” as his friend William Borroughs stated. Swallowing a small microphone, Chopin discovered the body as a factory of unceasing sound from which he created his well-known “audiopoems”: multilayered compositions of sounds that he materialized with electricity, going beyond the traditional verbal dimension of poetry and opening it up to a spatial one. His research came to touch the body cavities as ancestral synesthetic depths where there are no words but the purest and most basic units of sound, which he then assembled in a poetry of the internal spaces. Similarly, in his typewriter poems Chopin extracted the micro-particles of the language (i.e. the letters) in order to highlight their serial and conventional status as geometrized and predetermined sounds. For example, in La Crevette Amoureuse (1967-1975), his manuscript presented by Supportico Lopez, Chopin developed the narrative and the visual plot in a dynamic thickening of types that also generates ERnest MARiette, the pointy main characters, with a constant trespassing of the senses. Likewise the display, curated by architects Kuehn Malvezzi, unfolds the 146 pages of Chopin’s typewriter poem in a sculptural structure, adding a cinematographic uniqueness to the whole. (Bianca Stoppani)

Henri Chopin’s exhibition at Supportico Lopez (Berlin) will run through June 8.