Henri Chopin

Henri Chopin (1922-2008) was a visionary artist of his time. He was not only significant in an artistic role but as a person involved in cultural and political events. Witnessing some of the most important political and artistic events of the past century.

Chopin’s oeuvre includes poetry, sculpture and painting. Language, whether written or spoken, began to develop as his main theme, not only in his artistic work but also in his life. Chopin consistently attempted to reveal the human voice in its purest form, calling it "the raw primal voice of humanity”, thus producing the material quality of language anew. What exists as the unsayable is transformed by sonic and descriptive aspects that trigger what he calls “affective communications”, where communicating the unsayable outlines "a policy field of affect”. Henri Chopin resisted the omnipotence of the word as he writes in his article Why I Am The Author of Sound Poetry and Free Poetry: "... one cannot continue with the all-powerful word, the word that reigns over all".

In our time, when a new, networked, public media has been transformed, in immeasurable dimensions, into an instrument of word manipulation and the instability and performativity of the sign and it's meaning has been trapped as hostage to the current media’s "dispute about the truth”, it seems indispensable to evoke forms of affect, that lead us to other experiences and reflections on our existence and cohabitation. The surviving potentiality, resists actual regressive conditions through the reexamination of this critical and artistic form.