CAMILO GODOY: RENACEMOS A CADA INSTANTE Favorite 

As the New Museum’s 2023–24 Artist-in-Residence, Camilo Godoy will create a performance exploring movement, breathing, and mourning practices. The title of his residency is borrowed from an embroidered work made by the queer Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión in 1995, the year before he died of AIDS-related complications. Godoy adjusts Centurión’s title Renazco a cada instante (I am reborn at every moment) to “renacemos a cada instante” (we are reborn at every moment) to emphasize collective celebrations of life and death. Using the Museum’s theater as a space for rehearsal, dialogue, and collaboration, Godoy invites the public to join his evolving process through interactive workshops, an open rehearsal, and sessions with teenagers participating in the Museum’s NewMu Teens program.

This residency draws on Godoy’s Choreographic Studies, a personal archive and a constellation of collaged images that represent the human body performing gestures of eroticism, ecstasy, grief, and pain. Godoy sources the images from historical archives, art history, pornography, and medical materials. He intersperses them with photographs of himself and other dancers rehearsing and arranges the images in sequences of evocative poses that he treats as dance notations or instructions. Taken together, this archive presents an alternate history of emotional life, surfacing queer experiences of death, intimacy, and sexual expression.

Through his collaborative and improvisatory choreographic process, Godoy will draw inspiration from this archive to develop a new performance based on mourning practices and the resilience found in bodily joy and pleasure.

“Camilo Godoy: renacemos a cada instante,” the New Museum’s 2023-2024 artist-in-residence program, is organized by Alethea Rockwell, Keith Haring Director of Education and Public Engagement, Gi (Ginny) Huo, Assistant Director of Education, and Austin D Bowes, Public Programs Coordinator. Performance production by Derek Wright, Senior Production Manager. With project support from Laura Hakel, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow.