Family Life – recomposed: Yann Coppier

Family life, and children in general are commonly associated with chaos and unsolicited noise. Something sound artists themselves mostly try to avoid, as the worst place for them to work. The 16-loudspeaker installation, in opposition, aims at celebrating the musicality in everyday life, where intimacy and brutality, tensions and resolutions, power and abandonment are all intrinsically linked together.

A family of four was thus recorded through a network of omnidirectional microphones set in an apartment located on Blågårdsgade, Copenhagen, early 2022. The technique used doesn’t aim at recording people, instruments nor objects in a defined space though, but the space itself including its full acoustics in which, incidentally, people, instruments and/or objects might be interacting. Making it counter-intuitively a non-anthropocentric work which allows its audience to experience a most intimate world from any point of listening, somehow from the apartment’s own point of view: everywhere and nowhere at the same time as it seemingly encapsulates everything, the inside and the outside, in a 100m2 box filled with emotions…

In January 2022 a first highly immersive version which blended discussions, drama and music, both instrumental and spectral, was created at Inter Arts Center. As the most complex dramaturgies unfolded on an everyday basis, in a place few people external to the inner family circle are allowed to peek, it pushed participants to walk among “ghosts”: other people’s memories seemed to walk literally through them – or was the audience reduced to ghosts itself?

The project will now develop through a second residence in March 2023, with a clear goal to expand its emotional content, develop its concept and present it in front of a wider audience. Also, placing the family (or the apartment in which the family lives) in the center of the art piece implies a potential radical change in the way we as a society consider our ties to what we could call our inner and outer lives, maybe by joining them – at least for some time.

Yann Coppier is a French sound artist based in Copenhagen, where he relentlessly questions, experiments and invents his own ways of making sound in the real and in the virtual world.

Visit Yann Coppier’s webpage – studio-ovale.com

Open showings “Family Life Recomposed”
15 & 16 March 2023: at 13:00, 14:00 and 15:00 (3 timeslots)
17 & 18 March 2023: at 13:00, 14:00, 15:00 and 16:00 (4 timeslots)
Limited places: max. 8 people per showing/timeslot
Registration: Please register for participation by sending an email to yankow [at] studio-ovale [dot] com (yankow[at]studio-ovale[dot]com) and indicating the DAY/TIME you wish to attend.
Location: Black Room

Absurd sounds and the use of space. Master Class with Yann Coppier
Wed 8 March 2023, at 15:00–17:00
Linked to the intimate 3D sound installation “Family Life – recomposed”, through this master class the audience will be exposed to the challenges of such a complex project while experiencing it, following Yann’s ambitious artistic research publication around “Absurd Sounds on Journal of Artistic Research” (JAR), in 2021.