Sergio Zevallos

Lima, 1962. Lives in Berlin

Sergio Zevallos’ production is associated with the radical experience of Grupo Chaclacayo (1982-1994), of which he was a member alongside Helmut Psotta and Raúl Avellaneda. The group’s actions were created within the context of State-sponsored terrorism and the armed conflict with paramilitary organizations in Peru. Chaclacayo is a contemporary of Movimiento Subterráneo, a countercultural, anarchist phenomenon in which musicians, poets and architects came together to conduct radical actions on the fringes of the official art scene in 1980s Lima. In Chaclacayo’s statements, the body—theatrically cross-dressed and performed in a manner that blends pornography and Catholic liturgy—operated as a powerful criticism against the physical and symbolic violence that colonialism, religion and militarism impose upon the subject. This uncolonized, tortured, mutilated, burned or “disappeared” body was exhibited, naturalized and turned into spectacle on a daily basis in the media. According to Paul Preciado, Grupo Chaclacayo “operated one of the sharpest reflections on the functioning of necropolitics in post-colonial societies, their relations with mythic-religious instruments of semiotization and its sensorial and sexual metabolization through the social body”.

At Frestas, Zevallos presents Cuaderno de matemática [Math Notebook] (2014) and the pieces Callejón oscuro [Dark Alley] (2013) and HKG (2014), part of the series Matemática [Mathematics] (2013-2014). In this set of works, the artist builds narratives in which figurative representations of the human being form direct relations with instruments for the control, pathologization and extermination of bodies that are neither white nor heteronormative. The elements of these standardizing discourses are appropriated from texts, data and graphs taken from books on anatomy, physiology and hygiene, forensic medicine and Peru’s penal and civil codes.

[F.J.]