Are there copper pipes in heaven / ERU KOPARRR HIMMIRKI

Faroese is a traditionally repressed language though it has made great strides since gaining semi-autonomy from Denmark after WWII. For several decades, Katrin Ottarsdóttir—a pioneer in Faroese filmmaking and poet—has been making work across disciplines, committed to breaking this silence in defiance of the secretive culture in the Faroe Islands that demands it.



Ottarsdóttir’s groundbreaking, award-winning 1999 film, Bye, Bye, Bluebird was the first feature film made in the Faroese language; to date she has made several documentaries, shorts etc., as well as two more award-winning feature films: Atlantic Rhapsody (1989), and Ludo (2014). Ottarsdóttir has since gone on to write two books of poetry. The first, now forthcoming from the Operating System in a rare dual-language translation including the Faroese, is Are there Copper Pipes in Heaven, an autobiographical account of her abusive mother’s drug use and eventual suicide. This book was the first Faroese collection of confessional poetry and was highly controversial in a society that does not make public such personal topics, yet despite this it was awarded the Faroese Litterature Award in 2013. (Her film, Ludo, explores the same material.) In 2015 Ottarsdóttir published the poetry collection Mass For A Film, and in 2016 a collection of short stories, After Before.