Artists: Ella Boureau, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Eduardo Restrepo-Castaño, Mike Funk, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Xavier Valcárcel
December 1, 2017
For December’s Sunday Service, curator Camilo Godoy presented “We have to live differently,” bringing together artists to explore ideas of “difference.”
The title is borrowed from Alice Walker’s poem “Calling All Grand Mothers.” This program projects a video piece by artist Eduardo Restrepo standing with their gender-nonconforming self in front of a cathedral, writer Ella Boureau reads excerpts from her lesbian erotica, poets Jorge Sánchez and Xavier Valcárcel read about homosexual encounters, love, lust, and Latinidad, dancer Miguel Angel Guzmán improvises various movement phrases throughout the space to interrogate how the body moves, and artist Jordan Demetrius Lloyd performs a scored improvisation solo about blackness, sensuality and the audience’s gaze. This program confronts questions of gender, sexual, and racial difference to insist that we live differently.
About the Artists
Ella Boureau is an NYC based playwright, director, essayist, and short-story writer, as well as the Awards Coordinator for Lambda Literary Foundation. She founded and ran the online magazine and reading series In the Flesh for several years. Her writing has been featured in Guernica, Tin House, Slice Magazine, and Full Stop, and her first play, Helps to Hate You a Little: A Lovestory debuted at Cloud City in November 2016.
Miguel Angel Guzmán is an independent dancer and actor residing in New York City. He has lived and performed in Mexico, Tel Aviv and Berlin, and continues to travel extensively to make work alongside artists from various disciplines. His most recent collaborations include work with choreographer Coco Karol as well as with musicians Lady Rizo and Amanda Palmer. He will been seen next in Romanian choreographer Alexandra Pirici’s commissioned piece at the New Museum of Contemporary Art at the beginning of February 2018.
eduardo restrepo-castaño generates surreal narratives through a practice that draws from academic research and lived experience, to delve into sites where social constructions around nature, gender difference, and the diasporic condition overlap. Co-founder of curatorial platform Sweety’s, as well as participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, restrepo-castaño has exhibited in spaces such as SOMA (Mexico,) Musée de l’Élysés (Switzerland,) and Bruce High Quality Foundation (New York,).
Mike Funk is a writer who draws. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and makes comics, music and time for his cat.
Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a NYC based artist living in West Harlem. Originally from Albany, NY he is a graduate of The College at Brockport. He has collaborated with and performed for Karl Rogers/Red Dirt Dance, Netta Yerushalmy, Tammy Carrasco/Wild Beast Dance, Brendan Drake and David Dorfman Dance.
Xavier Valcárcel is a Puerto Rican writer and editor. In 2009, he founded in San Juan, along with Puerto Rican poet and translator Nicole Delgado, the editorial project Atarraya Cartonera, the first Cartonera project in the Caribbean. He has published seven poetry books to date and his work has been translated to English, German and Portuguese.
About the Curator
Camilo Godoy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is concerned with the construction of political meanings and histories. His work engages with conceptual and choreographic strategies to negotiate questions that confront the politics of citizenship, imperialism and sexuality. Godoy analyzes and challenges past and present historical moments to imagine different subversive ways of being. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia and is based in New York, United States. He is a graduate of The New School with a BFA from Parsons School of Design, 2012; and a BA from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, 2013. Godoy is currently a resident at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) and was a 2015-2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence; 2014 Keyholder Resident, Lower East Side Printshop; 2014 Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program Fellow, The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU; and 2012 Fellow, Queer Art Mentorship. His work has been presented at venues such as Center for Performance Research, New York; Judson Church, New York; La Mama Galleria, New York; Donaufestival, Krems; and Mousonturm, Frankfurt, among others.
About Sunday Service
Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.
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Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.