ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe presents Analivia Cordeiro: From Body to Code

Analivia Cordeiro was born in 1954 in So Paulo, Brazil, and is a dancer, choreographer, and architect. She has been producing a continuous and intense transdisciplinary work exploring the relationships between body, movement, visual and audiovisual art, as well as media art since 1973, and is regarded as a pioneer in both video art and computer-based video dance. Analivia is regarded as the founder of video art in Latin America, having pioneered the M3x3 computer-based video dance in 1973, laying the way for the first generation to experiment with the technology. She was also a pioneer in programming an algorithm for choreographic notation, which she created specifically for camera and used as the foundation for her video dance script.

Analivia Cordeiro began programming a computerized dancing system in Fortran IV between 1973 and 1976. She acquired comprehensive choreographic directions for dancers, TV directors, and cameramen using her notation technique. Other computer-based video dance works by her include 0°45° (1974/1975), Gestures (1975), and Cambiantes (1976). Analivia Cordeiro and Nilton Lobo began developing an innovative software for computer notation and movement recording using three-dimensional properties of photographs through computer processing in 1983. Nota-ambitious Anna’s approach outperformed all previous two-dimensional image-based notation systems.

Analivia Cordeiro employs transdisciplinary aesthetics incorporating extremely modern choreography, artistic conception of space and scenography, as well as an audiovisual language in her most performative and videographic approaches to the body from the 1970s and 1980s. Her experimental and participatory activities create a unique computing method paired with a sensitive and poetic language.

For the first time in Europe, her solo exhibition From Body to Code at ZKM will bring together the most prominent works of her artistic history. Her intense and ongoing research on human body movement was and continues to be important for Analivia Cordeiro’s work in the most diverse disciplines, including dance and choreography, performance, audio-visual, photography, sculpture, and painting. Her research and projects were gradually expanding into other fields, such as web-based performances and dance motion-capture apps, but also interactive installations, which she co-authored with Nilton Lobo. However, technologies are never a goal in themselves, but rather a vehicle to examine the potentials of human body movement expression.

In this sense, the exhibition will juxtapose her first iconic video art creations (computer-based video dance) from 1973 to 1976 with a selection of her most representative works from the 1980s to the present in the formats of video projection, video installation, interactive art, painting, and sculpture. The display will be supplemented with original photographs, antique notations and sketches, drawings, and texts from her projects, all of which will chronicle and expand on her research and labor. A collection of pictures of the artist by renowned Brazilian photographer Bob Wolfenson from 1987 to 2020 will also be included in the exhibition.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the ZKM will publish an English-language book containing a compilation of her work since the 1970s. It will be the most comprehensive synthesis of Cordeiro’s work to date. Analivia Cordeiro. From Body to Code provides photographic evidence and explanatory texts for all of her works, as well as the primary texts written by Analivia Cordeiro from 1973 to 2018, as well as a collection of key historical records, particularly from the beginning of her career.

The range of information is completed by the introductory texts on her work by Claudia Giannetti, curator of the exhibition and editor of the book, and Peter Weibel, chairman of ZKM, as well as historical and current texts written between 1980 and 2020 about her artistic production by various authors.

Curator: Claudia Giannetti

Curatorial project management: Hanna Jurisch, Philipp Ziegler