CURATED BY CHRISTOPH DRAEGER AND JUAN PUNTES
NOVEMBER 22, 2009

Black Zero was first performed in 1965 at the Astor Place Playhouse as part of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque’s New Cinema Festival-a showcase for avant-garde films and performances that eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives. The sequence of events that night included activist Ben Morea and other members of Tambellini’s “Group Center” collective making noise compositions with grinders and kitchenware, blasts of improvisation from jazz bassist Alan Silva and trumpeter Bill Dixon, live readings by poet Calvin C. Hernton (a member of the Lower East Side African American poetry group UMBRA), and Tambellini projecting his own black-and-white, chemically and mechanically assaulted films and slides onto a slowly inflating black weather balloon.

Ben Morea told me about Black Zero when I met him by chance outside a Manhattan thrift shop in 2008. The following year, I helped Tambellini re-create the performance, nearly half a century after its inception, for Performa 09. Assisted by Tambellini’s partner Anna M. Salamone, the Performa evening once again included Morea making noise music, this time with power tools; bassists William Parker and Hill Greene; and Tambellini himself, now eighty years old, orchestrating the same black-and-white projections from so many years ago, using the original slides and projection equipment. After thirty-five minutes, Tambellini ended the celebratory evening when he took out his pocketknife and burst the overinflated weather balloon that had hung over the proceedings.

-Christoph Draeger

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