Analivia Cordeiro

Analivia Cordeiro reimagined figuration for a new era.
The perpetual innovator refers to her approach to art making as researches. She is an accomplished academic with awards and degrees in dance, art and architecture, multimedia, computer science and semiotics. Her Phd advisor was Arlindo Machado. She completed post-doctorate work in 2010 and again in 2018 with her influential thesis, The Architecture of Human Movement.  

Simultaneously, she cultivated her skills as a dancer/choreographer in both classical and modern technique through training in São Paulo, New York and Paris. She focused on progressive approaches espoused by luminaries including Rudolf von Laban, Merce Cunningham and Virginia Graham. In addition to cultivating her skills as a stage performer and she continues to be a celebrated educator, lecturer and visual artist focused on digital applications for artistic expression.  

As the BFVPP focuses on pioneering work before 1985, what follows encapsulates her early influences and achievements. Her father, Waldemar Cordeiro (Brazilian. 1925- 1973, born in Rome) explored avant garde figuration in painting and neo concrete abstraction.  He was also a leading activist intellectual and art theorist, an innovative landscape designer and author of art manifestos, journals and art criticism. During the late 1960s, this early advocate of computer science applications in the production of art, experimented with the massive IBM 360/44, in tandem with physics professor, Giorgio Moscati. In 1971, to spotlight the interface between art and electronic technology, he produced a legendary conference and exhibition of works by international artists. Arteonica opened at Museu de Arte Brasilieira da Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado.

By the early 1970s, Analivia, although still a teenager, was experimenting with dance, performance and lightworks as well as cultivating her familiarity with early computer systems. Her endeavors impressed several conference participants and garnered invitations to participate in international gatherings such as INTERACT Machine : Man : Society in Edinburgh, in August 1973.   This request, from the international Computer Arts Society, ignited her work-in-progress. She enlisted TV (station) Cultura de São Paulo and UNICAMP computer center to help her realize a seminal work. M3x3 (1972-1973) merged choreography, actual space and computer-driven data into a stark, stunning video installation cum kinetic sculpture – a landmark in Brazilian art which remains in demand for exhibitions to this day.

Conceptualizing M3x3 (1972-73)                                                                                                                                        
In addition to the influence of her father, Cordeiro often cites the impact of very early recollections – specifically, watching a Calder mobile suspended over her crib and her encounters with a unique film. On dance class fieldtrip to the Goethe Institut, she discovered a film on Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus era, Triadic  Ballet (1922) and returned to see it, repeatedly.   Also, she studied the geometric abstractions of early 20^th century artists such as Mondrian.  The enduring power of M3x3, may relate to her combination of various modernisms — Concrete, Constructivist, Op, Minimal and Conceptual notions of Art — melded into more than the sum of their parts.   Her radical figuration was not only a formal innovation.  Edward Shanken has suggested M3x3 illuminates broader revolutionary implications. He argues Cordeiro deploys “post-colonialist female bodies to expressively contest the relationship between control and freedom in masculinist, technological society…in particular, (to contest) an extreme form of control exacted by Brazil’s military dictatorship.  

Producing M3x3   
Shot in a television studio, Cordeiro describes the deployment :  “the computer-based choreographic script (is driven by) three cameras: one in front, one  from the side, and another focused upward on a mirror located on the ceiling, positioned to parallel the floor on the set…” (invented to compensate for the limitations of the ceiling height). Curator Claudia Giannetti confirms, the space “was divided into nine squares (marked by black marks on white walls and floor, hence the title 3×3.”) As she had for her earlier dance performances, Cordeiro designed the costumes.  The graphic play of black and white for background, outfits and body paint, offset the limitations of low resolution (a characteristic of early iterations of video technology and vintage film). The effect fused the space of,  around and between dancers and their setting.  In installation, the work is projected to absorb an actual corner.  This invigorated dimensions in ways actual and meta, embraced by Russian constructivists. The piece was shot in ¾ Umatic video but transferred to 16mm film for the international debut (and has been digitally remastered).  A metronome provided the only sound.  Giannetti and the artist have emphasized that despite this insistent beat and pace, the dancers, “having received certain notations…had a certain interpretive freedom in the transition of movement.”  To wit, in this work (human) irregularities co-exist with generative programming and computer-driven editing.  Post industrial sensibility absorbed the chill of automatization but also informed the thrill of spontaneous innovation and randomness.     

M3x3 recently                                                                                                                                                              
M3x3 endures – the work still provokes.  In 2015, the video was awarded by the BEEP Electronic Arts Prize at the ARCO Art Fair in Madrid.  There, Giannetti met the artist, which led to her retrospective at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) Karlsruhe, Germany, produced in 2022 with the godfather of media art, Peter Weibel.   In 2023, it was featured in
CODED : Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982  (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)  and cited by a critic as among the most significant works in the massive show. Even in this era of ever-evolving digital advances, viewers respond to M3x3 and can barely resist entering the trajectory of the projector beam. The draw of Cordeiro’s debut video work is rational yet ethereal, monotonous yet mesmerizing, vintage yet fresh, formal but evocative, antic but crisp, gestalt and ultimately, indelible.

Beyond M3x3                                                                                                                                                                
M3x3 spawned Cordeiro’s further investigations into computer-generated video dance through a series of three works, under the title 0°‹—›45° produced and modified from 1974 to 1989. The artist performs in each single-channel video, scored with William Russell’s Fox Trot, conducted by John Cage. Describing Version III the artist commented :It can be interpreted as a representation of the fragmented view of the human corporeal image as a consequence of the hectic lifestyle in industrial and computerized societies, coupled with the impact of the various media on the individual’s perception. Cordeiro produced a succession of single-channel video dance works including Gestos, 1975, Cambiates, 1976 and e, 1979. She also cultivated live dance concert performances and developed an original means of dance notation, Nota-Anna. All the while she maintained a rigorous schedule of continuing studies, lectures, writing and residencies.

During the 1970s, the artist also embedded with Amazonian tribes for over two months to produce an anthropological study.  With 35mm slides and Super 8 film she recorded their daily life, spoken language and body language.  She focused on the stories, choreography, vocalizations and instrumentation incorporated into Kwarup – death ritual. Her documentation explored ceremonial narratives and origin stories told through characters inspired by cosmic entities and local flora and fauna.
She synthesized her findings, creating an (still!) authoritative archive, a book, an academic exhibition Manuara (Memory) and a documentary.  Cordeiro also mined the experience to inform her own dance practice.  This endeavor echoes those of other Brazilian pioneer video artists, who have enlisted various media to ponder the interface between indigenous communities and Brazilian individual, artistic and collective and national identity.

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