Animating Memory: Affective Touch & Corporeality in the Work of Camilo Godoy and Carlos Martiel
Installation view of Camilo Godoy: El Infiernito (PROXYCO Gallery, New York, March 16 - April 23, 2022). From left to right, from the series Choreographic Studies, 2015-2022: (A Temple of the Butthole), (Miguel), (Sex Dances), (Giselle), (Furious Dancing). Photograph by Luis Corzo. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
To visual artist Carlos Martiel, recording performance art is much like creating an archive.¹
“I consider my performance art like an archive in itself, in terms of its documentation. The photographic and video documentation becomes registered like an archive of the times I am living through, as well as an archive of the problems of the times I have had to live.”²
In drawing out the relationship between archival and performance practices, Martiel invites us to consider how performances become transferred into physical records of the artist's creative practice as well as their political moment. While Martiel here speaks of archiving performances, his close friend and visual artist Camilo Godoy is more interested in performing archives and the information disclosed in them.
“We can create new histories through performance, especially when considering the violence of history. There are so many events that have not been documented by photographs or video but live from accounts of oral histories—of people talking and describing what they experienced. To me, performance is a device that allows us to examine something that is never seen but maybe read or heard about.”³
Together, the work of artists Camilo Godoy and Carlos Martiel capture the immediacy of generating and reanimating collective memory. Evoking the interrogative forms of the counter-archive, Godoy and Martiel question and disrupt conventional narratives of those historically disenfranchised, among them the Latinx and queer community.⁴ Rather than present objective or official views of history, the artists draw upon personal and cultural memory to offer subjective and contingent reports of history. The artists enact critical interrogations and revivals of past narratives through aesthetic strategies I heuristically describe here as affective touch and corporeality.
One of the most prominent aspects of Godoy’s performances, photographs, and assemblages is the continuous processing of colonial and queer stories, their beginnings, and archival sources. For pieces like Shock and Awe (2002/2014) and El Infiernito (2006) Godoy recovered digital photos and videos from his past—those still and moving images that “hold a place in [his] hard drive and in [his] head”—to produce retroactive self-portraits of his child and adolescent self.⁵ More recently, Godoy has turned to larger historical phenomena, archival practices, and their relation to official memory. His research manifests in various academic libraries and book collections such as the Columbia Rare and Special Collections library or the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, as well as the digital networks of information and visual culture.
Camilo Godoy, What did they actually see?, (“Possessed”), 2018. Archival pigment print mounted on aluminum (printed 2021), 44 x 74 inches. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
Camilo Godoy, What did they actually see?, (“Out of control”), 2018. Archival pigment print mounted on aluminum (printed 2021), 44 x 74 inches. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
For Godoy, the unique modalities of performance art and dance allow him to draw a relationship between the moving body and the archive. For the recent photographic series What Did They Actually See?, Godoy studied 17th to 19th century texts and anthropological reports written by Christian missionaries that describe ritual dances performed by indigenous people of the Americas as out of control, possessed, barbaric, deviant, and demonic.⁶ Godoy performed and photographed the annotated dance practices as a way to “imagine, rather than reimagine, what was seen.” The dark images recreate the context of ceremonies performed at night, often near a blazing fire. Through photography Godoy demonstrates the colonial gaze and, in this sense, he animates the archive by attaching movement and image to the written accounts of ceremony and ritual. Recasting the so-called deviant and barbaric dances into celebratory and vital movements, Godoy’s re-enactments operate as a form of recuperation and reclamation of colonial narratives. The dim prints carry a second, optic characteristic: they first appear like monochromatic black prints but upon further observation, the viewer’s eyes adapt to the dark images, making it easier to perceive the artist’s body caught in dynamic poses. The visual effect emblematizes how active contemplations of the past may allow suppressed or inverted histories to emerge out of the dark.
Carlos Martiel, Muerte al olvido (Death to Oblivion), 2019. University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, USA. Curated by Patricia Ortega-Miranda and Taras W Matla. Photography by Jonathan Thorpe.
Carlos Martiel, Muerte al olvido (Death to Oblivion), 2019. University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, USA. Curated by Patricia Ortega-Miranda and Taras W Matla. Photography by Jonathan Thorpe.
Martiel’s Muerte Al Olvido (Death to Oblivion) (2018) similarly engages with the material records of colonialism but specifically those artifacts and items of cultural heritage that bear witness to the history of dispossession in Africa. For his residency at the University of Maryland Art Gallery in 2018, Martiel visited the Department of Art History and Archeology’s permanent collection and picked out four works from Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and South Africa—countries that together make up 32% of Martiel’s DNA ancestry.⁷ One of the pieces, a wildebeest head sculpture, was reproduced in marble. In effect, a Cameroonian artifact was recast in the Western mode of marble sculpture and placed at the center of the gallery space; as Martiel lays in the corner, buried under the scraps of the reconstruction. The marble debris symbolically indexes colonial powers' extraction of resources and cultural heritage in Africa—a continent that was similarly fragmented and its people displaced through colonization. Organized in this way, the site-specific piece draws an oblique equation between western colonial expansion, the looting of African cultural heritage, and Martiel’s diasporic ancestry.
African objects are often displayed in Western museums in clusters on wall-mounted glass cases, while marble sculptures are raised by pedestals. Adopting the museum’s conventional methods of display, the exhibition calls attention to the art institution's cultural and material hierarchies of value. Martiel’s body—an entirely separate, third medium—and his transatlantic heritage fit uncertainly in the equation of the museum. Significantly, the viewer looks down at Martiel who cowers in the protective fetal position. The exhibition draws a symbolic relationship between the disarticulation of African objects from their original context, and Martiel’s disjointed connection with his ancestry.
If What did they actually see? implies an empowered reclaiming of colonial accounts, then Muerte al Olvido expresses the immobilizing weight of systemic oppression and exploitation. Godoy’s series of still photographs present choreographed movements caught in vibrant poses while Martiel’s live performance features his immobilized body. These works share a joint method of working with historical objects and testimonials, taken from two institutions of memory: Godoy works from the colonial textual archive, and Martiel performs within the museum which operates as the official repository for cultural memory. Moreover, both explore the archive of coloniality using their own bodies, thereby alluding to the corporeality of memory and resistance. The corporeal properties of their art exemplify a form of restorative intimacy with the past that is visceral, physical and affiliative.
Camilo Godoy, Choreographic Studies (Giselle) (Sex Dances), 2013-. Archival pigment prints, transparency film, glue, tape, and paint on wood panel, 16 x 20 inches. Photograph by Luis Corzo. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
Camilo Godoy, Choreographic Studies (Giselle) (Sex Dances), 2013-. Archival pigment prints, transparency film, glue, tape, and paint on wood panel, 16 x 20 inches. Photograph by Luis Corzo. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
For the ongoing project Choreographic Studies (2013-), Godoy searches our global cultural heritage in order to rethink and debunk erasures of queerness and indigeneity in history. He sources visual representations of sexual gatherings and dances in art history books and publications; and in the process, he creates his own collection of queer imagery transferred as Xeroxes, transparencies, or archival pigment prints. For these reproductions of queer imagery, Godoy photographs his hands touching the edges of the images. Alluding to the presence of flesh and touch, his tactile intervention reverberates the corporeal imagery pictured in the queer dances. This gesture is at once a declaration of queer presence and a reenactment of queer intimacy, which has historically been and often still is vulnerable to abuse and violence. Significantly, Godoy’s archival self-construction, which we could read as a retelling of the history of visual culture, undermines false narratives about the absence of queer populations in history and visual culture, and locates an alternative view by recovering the visual testimonies of queerness. Choreographic studies therefore literalizes the process of building a counterarchive.
Camilo Godoy, Choreographic Studies (Giselle), 2015-2022. Archival pigment prints, transparency film, glue, tape, and paint on wood panel, 16 x 20 inches. Photograph by Luis Corzo. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
Camilo Godoy, Choreographic Studies (Sex Dances), 2015-2022. Archival pigment print, transparency film, paper, glue, tape, and paint on wood panel, 16 x 20 inches. Photograph by Luis Corzo. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
Camilo Godoy, Choreographic Studies (Furious Dancing), 2015-2022. Archival pigment prints, transparency film, paper, glue, tape, and paint on wood panel, 16 x 20 inches. Photograph by Luis Corzo. Courtesy of the artist and PROXYCO Gallery.
This series also illustrates that conventional archives are not in all unhelpful for drawing out counter-histories. Even conventional archives contain overlooked materials of neglected or obscured stories. Mounted on purple cork boards with pins and tape for Godoy's exhibition at Proxyco Gallery, Choreographic Studies recalls that history is a shared project embedded in our present moment: the telling and retelling of history is an ongoing process. This idea of history as a shared project is also expressed in Godoy’s collaborative approach to art production: he frequently invites friends, including Martiel, to take part in his art (whether by participating in choreographed performances or photographed to produce new material for “Choreographic studies”) and as such are involved in his counter-archiving processes and products. In effect, Godoy gives space and primacy to queer intimacy and sociability in his counter-archive construction. The photographic reproduction is an iterative gesture that parallels the processes of relaying history. Godoy’s gesture of touching the archive suggests a more generative alternative to conventions of mining and extracting materials from the archive: his light-handed touch highlights the corporeality and intimate sociability encompassed in these images. As such, the piece marries past and contemporary visual vocabulary of queer intimacy.
Carlos Martiel with Brendan Mahoney. Continente, Y Gallery, Nueva York, EE.UU. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.
From here we may consider how visual and action art may engage with principles of counter-archiving by employing alternative modes of knowledge production that oppose memory erasure and, in effect, revive discussions about history. For Continente (Continent) (2017) nine diamonds were inserted into the skin of Martiel. A white American man removed the diamonds and placed them inside a box, leaving Martiel wounded and bleeding in the gallery space for several minutes. Like other examples of Martiel’s endurance art, Continente involves an intensive and extremely painful undertaking for Martiel who embodies in his performances the historical violence and structural oppression of diasporic people. Martiel’s body becomes a metaphor whereby the wounds inflicted on him evoke colonial violence and resource extraction. This conceptual gesture echoes Sociologist Anat Ben-David’s design of the counter-archive as an engagement with “alternative modes of knowledge production that re-open the discussion about what is public knowledge; it is provocation and resistance.⁸
Following this formulation of the counterarchive, Martiel and Godoy exploit the unique capacities of art to actively contribute to the telling and retelling of history. Together, their works exemplify how counter archives and their processes of assembly aid in the recuperation of incomplete accounts of history. Significantly, these works make clear that the archive functions not simply as a source of information but as an origin of counter-memory. Godoy and Martiel invite us to think of the archive as more than a monolithic institution but rather as a privileged site from which agents may unsettle and provoke conventional narratives.
Accordingly, when Godoy and Martiel transform history into palatable and embodied forms, they reassign histories of oppression and erasure into an aesthetics of commemoration. They share a recourse to a sensorial aesthetics of memory that is anchored by movement, corporeality, and affective touch. That is, both artists infuse history with visceral sentiment and in effect give body to memory. These visual registers allow us to historicize and see differently, to interrogate the past through the lens of queer intimacy and modes of affiliation.⁹
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Endnotes
¹ This article is an extension of a research paper written by Madison Conliffe, Jorge Sánchez and me in the spring of 2022.
² Carlos Martiel. “Seeing Otherwise: Latinx Counter-memory and Counter-archives,” artist panel moderated by Clara Apostolatos, Madison Conliffe, and Jorge Sánchez, May 3, 2022.
³ Ibid. Camilo Godoy
⁴ Counter-archives embrace alternative sources, reports and narratives to enact interventions to official memory. Counter-archival practices may divulge alternate or complementary accounts of history as a way of resisting hegemonic memory politics.
⁵ Camilo Godoy, “Seeing Otherwise: Latinx Counter-memory and Counter-archives,” artist panel on May 3, 2022.
⁶ Thorsen, Sofie. “Counter-Archiving: Combating Data Colonialism,” Medium (Scenario, November 16, 2020). https://medium.com/copenhagen-institute-for-futures-studies/counter-archiving-combating-data-colonialism-be17ffead4
⁶ Camilo Godoy, Gallery Tour of El Infiernito at PROXYCO Gallery, April 21, 2022.
⁶ Such as settler and colonial accounts of witchcraft and lack of civility in Cuban indigenous traditions of dance as ritual.
⁷ Which was announced by a DNA analysis report that accompanied the exhibition.
⁸ Thorsen, Sofie. “Counter-Archiving: Combating Data Colonialism,” Medium (Scenario, November 16, 2020). https://medium.com/copenhagen-institute-for-futures-studies/counter-archiving-combating-data-colonialism-be17ffead4.
⁹ I would like to thank Jorge Sánchez, Madison Conliffe and Edward Sullivan for their collaboration and help in organizing the artist panel, SEEING OTHERWISE, that inspired the original research paper and this article. I would also like to thank them for sharing their invaluable insight and feedback throughout this process; and Juliana Juarbe and Hunter Garrison for their careful reading and comments.
Clara Maria Apostolatos is an M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art of Latin America, Institutional Critique, and the politics of memory. She co-curated the exhibition “Kenneth Kemble and Silvia Torras: The Formative Years, 1956-63” and held positions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Center for Italian Modern Art, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.