May 11-28. Sergio Zevallos: LE CODE BLANC (The White Code) A Granular Audition + Archivo Ambulantes

Sergio Zevallos: LE CODE BLANC (The White Code) A Granular Audition + Archivo Ambulantes
Exhibition: May 11–May 28, Th, Fr & Sa, 14:00-18:00
Commencement: Wednesday, May 11, 18:00-21:00

The installation at TIER presents the results of the workshop carried out last year by Sergio Zevallos as part of the series Somatic Charting: The House is the Body. This was a one-on-one encounter based on the book Le Code Noir (The Black Code)—a document on the systematization of the black slave trade promulgated by Louis XIV in 1685—and on some other related texts and songs. The conceptual reversal of the project title indicates the intention to play with the postulates of the code as a study in discourse transmutation.

Starting from his daily practice in the use of the voice and from his work with sound and concrete poetry, Sergio Zevallos proposed a series of exercises, where the voice, the body gesture and the action of writing converged.
The sessions, which took place on-site in Berlin October 19 and 20, 2021, were audio-recorded, and excerpts from the recordings were used to develop a polyphonic composition.

The “Archivo Ambulantes” from 1983 is a collection of images and texts from the research/production of the photo series “Suburbios – Pasiones de un cuerpo Ambulante”, made during the Grupo Chaclacayo project in Lima, Peru. It contains more than 250 negatives on 9 x 14 cm baryta paper, as well as a photographic documentation of how the actions were carried out, the handwritten and hand-drawn scripts for the performances, sound scores for those performances, press clippings and dozens of religious and popular religious and popular images from the 1980s. Doing a selection from the archive, we aim at showing Sergio Zevallos’s practice of writing/drawing scores, both for performances and for sonic installations and sound compositions, which connects with the workshop installation developed within the frame of Somatic Charting.

Somatic Charting. The House is the Body (2020-21) was co-curated by Elena Basteri and TIER, and was supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Between Bridges, and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Sergio Zevallos (Lima, 1962)
Co-founder of the Grupo Chaclacayo, a collective from the 80s with whom he made a provocative work relating armed conflicts with sexual and racial discrimination, desacralizing religious icons and the heroic masculinity of the soldier in the Latin American context. He migrated to Germany in 1989 and since 2012 lives between Lima and Berlin.
He works with photography, drawing, installation, sound and performance, with themes of cross-cultural identity, gender and the relationship between the individual, the power, the intimacy and the public life.
www.sergiozevallos.net

Grupo Chaclacayo was an art collective from Lima, Peru active from 1982-1994. Through their subversive happenings, processions, photography, drawings, artifacts, and sculptures, they used their bodies as a site to critique issues within Catholicism, military violence, the mistreatment of indigenous communities, and against patriarchy and machismo. Grupo Chaclacayo was comprised of three central members: Helmut Psotta, Sergio Zevallos, and Raul Avellaneda, although they occasionally collaborated with others including Jorge Angeles, Sixto Paniora, Frido Martin, Klaus Wittkamp, Cesar Guerra, and Piero Pereira.