Émile Sadria

Intermission

Anatomical Songbook

With a meticulous focus on individual joints and muscles, Anatomical Songbook poses the question of whether music should be categorized exclusively as an auditory phenomenon, i.e. something that must be heard. In Anatomical Songbook there are no instruments that play music, but instead a body that show music.

The work consists of twelve songs, each based on a body part as a musical instrument. With a point of departure in the composer’s musical instructions, the body’s motor functions are experienced through the cinematic gestures as more or less abstract pictorial movements.

Anatomical Songbook has been developed for the Medical Museion in Copenhagen in a collaboration between the composer Jeppe Ernst, video artist Émile Sadria and singer/performer Jakob Bloch Jespersen.

Anatomical Songbook will be shown on 4 screens that are temporarily placed as an integral part of the Medical Museion’s permanent exhibitions. This create a dialogue between the scientific focus of the exhibitions and the sensuous look of the body in the art films.