Each chapter will feature a conversation between the most remarkable artists from Latin America and Latinx in the U.S. and our MOLAA Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga. Together we will focus on a series or specific artwork which requires a close inspection, a deliberate process of contemplation, and exploration; delving into the ideas surrounding the creation of the works, their sources of research and inspiration, in an effort to immerse ourselves in the world of the artists.
Join Chapter #33 of the MOLAA Zoom Project, where MOLAA's Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga will join artist Analivia Cordeiro for a conversation.
Photograph of Analivia Cordeiro by Bob Wolfenson, 1989.
Analivia Cordeiro
She was born in São Paulo and has a Ph.D. degree with two postdocs. She is a member of the UNESCO International Dance Commission. She started her studies of modern dance at the age of 7 in São Paulo. From an early age, she showed interest in exploring the interdisciplinary relationships of dance with other artistic areas and above all with the use of audiovisual and computer-based technologies. In 1973 she created the computer video artwork M3x3, which placed her as a Latin American pioneer of video art and one of the world pioneers in computer-dance and electronic arts. That work was presented at the Edinburgh International Festival that year.
She graduated in Architecture from the University of São Paulo in 1976. She continued with her specialization in contemporary dance and choreography in the United States, where she was a student of Merce Cunningham, at the Dance Studio in New York, between 1977 and 1979, and also in the studios of Alvin Nikolais. Her experience and stay in New York during a period of experimental art effervescence complemented her vision for artistic languages at the intersection with performance, body art, video-dance and / or video-choreography and computer art, which were already explored in her computer-dance phase (1973/76).
Her solid education allowed the exploration, in an innovative and never conventional way, of the multiple dimensions of the body as a field, as a means, and as an interface inscribed in the concept of meta-performance, present in the expanded and transdisciplinary use of technological resources.
Between the 70s and 90s, her work was presented in Brazil and in numerous international exhibitions of historical importance, among which the following:
XII São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (1973)
LatinAmerica 74, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1974)
International Conference Computer & Humanities / 2, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1976)
20th American Dance Guild Conference, New York (1976)
Presentation on the public TV channel WGBH (1976)
Brazil XX Century, Bienal de São Paulo (1984)
Art and Technology, Itaú Cultural, São Paulo (1996)
27th Annual Dance on Camera Festival, New York (1998)
Arlindo Machado says that, in 1989, “on the occasion of the 20th Bienal de São Paulo, the artist, in collaboration with the scenographer and director Otávio Donasci, presented a performance where you could see an actor performing live with the image of a woman projected on a big screen […] made of a very elastic fabric […] Analívia was able to put herself behind the screen and model it with her body. ” (2011) This is an example among the several projects carried out by Analívia Cordeiro that offer multisensory experiences to the public at the intersection of plastic and body movement with visual, audiovisual, and performance arts, profiling itself as a precursor in Brazil of this type of media art.
After a period of several years dedicated to the organization and dissemination of her father's artistic legacy, Waldemar Cordeiro, Analívia returned to the artistic scene with new proposals, including virtual dance, sculpture and participatory and interactive art.
From the 21st century onwards, her work gradually gained international recognition. In addition to her participation in important exhibitions in Brazil, such as Made in Brazil at Itaú Cultural (São Paulo 2003/5), at the 7th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2009) and at the 10th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2015), she was invited to international exhibitions of notorious historical importance, which place her work alongside renowned artists. Among others:
B3 Biennale of Moving Images - Expanded Senses, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt (2015)
The End of the World, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy (2016-2017)
Video art in Latin America, Laxart, Los Angeles (2016-2017), curated by the Getty Research Institute
Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018), Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2018)
Coder le Monde, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris (2018), in which she was included in the timeline among the global precursors of computer-art and among the great world masters
Control and Chance: Art in the Age of Computer, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2018), which celebrated 50 years of computer-generated art with a selection of the main pioneers
Latino America 6, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain.
Code: computer art from 1952 to 1982, LACMA, Los Angeles, USA.
In 2018, her solo exhibition Chutes Inesquecíveis was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, curated by Fernando Cocchiarale, with new works based on the study of decoded movements in three-dimensional shapes, developed using the software Nota-Anna, created in 1983/2017 by the artist and computer scientist Nilton Lobo. This human movement writing app has been featured at major technology events and worldwide lectures such as:
Sawyers Seminar, University of Chicago, (1999)
L'Ombra dei Maestri - Rudolf Laban: gli spazi della danza, Università degli Studi di Bologna, (1999)
2001 JavaOne, Moscone Center, San Francisco
2003 JavaOne, San Francisco
A Brazilian Computer-Video-Dance from 70s, University of California Berkeley (2020)
Represented by the prestigious German gallery Anita Beckers, her work was presented at the main international art fairs. In 2015, at the ARCO Madrid Art Fair, she received the BEEP Award for Electronic Art, and her piece M3x3 became part of Spain's most important collection of media art. More recently she integrated a group of artists from the Chilean gallery Isabel Aninat Galeria and the artists of Luciana Brito Gallery, in Brazil.
Her work belongs to important public and private international contemporary art collections, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum Collection, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Concrete Art, Ingolstadt; the archive of the artist Oskar Schlemmer as an international follower. In Brazil, it is part of private and public collections, such as those at the USP Contemporary Art Museum, São Paulo; Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the Itaú Cultural Collection, São Paulo.
Curated by Claudia Giannetti, for 2023, the 50th anniversary of the creation of the first video artwork M3x3, her retrospective solo exhibition at ZKM, Germany, and Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas, Spain.
