Cuerpxs en Resonancia: Cognitive Body — Repetition to Repair + Story Circle

Cuerpxs en Resonancia is a three-part, bilingual movement-and-sound workshop curated by MexFest Co-Directors Arantxa Araujo + Xtian Ávila.
About this Event

Cuerpxs en Resonancia: Cognitive / Affective Body — Repetition to Repair + Story Circle
Artists: Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel Atrib & Mónica Palma

The second offering centers the cognitive and affective body as a site of memory, identity, and belonging. Through bilingual story circles, writing, and collective conversation, participants are invited to reflect on migration, labor, care, and resilience, discovering how personal narratives become shared histories through listening, repetition, and exchange.

The experience unfolds around a personal object that evokes home—perhaps something worn, broken, or carefully preserved. Through these objects, participants explore how vulnerability becomes a point of connection and how the cracks we carry often reveal our deepest histories. Together, stories, movement, and shared reflection become acts of repair, weaving individual memories into a collective archive of belonging.

ABOUT
Cuerpxs en Resonancia is a three-part bilingual series of participatory performances, communal rituals, workshops, and artistic offerings organized by MexFest, curated by Arantxa Araujo and Xtian Ávila, and hosted at Socrates Sculpture Park during Hispanic Heritage Month.

The series intentionally pairs Mexican artists with artists from across the Latinx diaspora, creating interdisciplinary collaborations that generate new artistic relationships, shared methodologies, and spaces for cross-cultural dialogue. Together, the three offerings explore the physical, cognitive, and energetic dimensions of the body through movement, sound, storytelling, visual art, and collective care.

Cuerpxs en Resonancia welcomes immigrant communities, essential workers, hospitality, kitchen and delivery workers, artists, cultural workers, families, and neighbors into a shared space of creativity and care. Through free bilingual artistic offerings, the series celebrates the wisdom carried by our bodies while creating opportunities to build relationships across cultures, generations, and disciplines.

Together, we transform public space into a place where belonging is practiced, culture is shared, and community is created through participation.

MexFest is an artist-led platform for multidisciplinary artistic exchange, cultural visibility, and community care. Founded by Xtian Ávila in 2023, MexFest was created to center Mexican artists, culture, and traditions while fostering meaningful dialogue with the broader Latinx diaspora.

In 2025, Arantxa Araujo joined as Co-Artistic Director expanding the initiative into a collaborative platform that commissions and presents participatory performances, exhibitions, workshops, and public programs rooted in experimentation, cultural memory, and collective care.

Rather than presenting Mexican culture as a fixed identity, MexFest embraces it as a living, evolving practice—one that invites collaboration across disciplines, generations, and Latinx diaspora. MexFest cultivates new artistic relationships, cross-cultural exchange, and shared methodologies that honor tradition while generating new forms of collective creation.

BIOS
is a queer Mexican transdisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural organizer whose practice centers performance while expanding into video, installation, photography, sculpture, and participatory systems. Influenced by neuroscience, somatic practice, and social choreography, Araujo creates multisensory environments where movement, sound, light, and collective participation converge to explore migration, perception, memory, and alternative forms of social connection.

Their work has been presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Queens Museum, Abrons Arts Center, and internationally through festivals including Illuminus (Boston) and Nuit Blanche (Canada). A recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund and other awards, Araujo is currently developing a new commissioned work with Franklin Furnace and ISSUE Project Room, premiering on September 23, 2026. They serve as Program Manager at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, are Co-Artistic Director of MexFest, and Curator of Art in Odd Places 2026: UTOPIAS, where they continue to champion experimental, interdisciplinary, and community-centered artistic practices.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel Atrib is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, educator, and community practitioner born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and self-described as a "Bronxite" since 2011. His work unfolds through everyday encounters, participatory experiences, and socially engaged practices that invite reflection on migration, identity, spirituality, care, and belonging. Blurring the boundaries between performance, pedagogy, and daily life, his projects create spaces for dialogue, collective imagination, and transformation. His work has been presented internationally at venues including PERFORMA, MoMA, the Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Franklin Furnace, SculptureCenter, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Prague Quadrennial. He is the Founding Director of The Interior Beauty Salon, an ongoing artistic platform dedicated to creative exchange, hospitality, and radical acts of care.

is a Mexican-born curator, theatermaker, teaching artist, and cultural producer whose practice creates spaces for artistic exchange, cultural visibility, and community building. His work spans theater, curation, and public programming, centering Mexican culture while fostering dialogue with the broader Latinx community. His theatrical credits include Last Christmas (The Tank NYC), The Sun Serpent (Hangar Theatre), and productions of Romeo & Juliet and Twelfth Night (New York Live Arts). He is the founder and Co-Artistic Director of MexFest, an artist-led platform that commissions and presents multidisciplinary programs rooted in collective care, experimentation, and cultural exchange. Ávila has collaborated with Flushing Town Hall, The Public Theater, The Clemente Center's Historias initiative, and The Tank NYC. A Drama League Fellow, yoga instructor, and board member of the Gay Latino Collective, he remains committed to employing the arts as a catalyst for connection, belonging, and social impact.

is a Mexico City-born interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn whose practice spans sculpture, installation, and performance. Working with materials such as paper, metal, encaustic, tar, and obsidian, she explores the body as a site of memory, identity, and transformation, creating tactile works that balance fragility with resilience. Through processes of imprinting, layering, and material resistance, Palma investigates the relationship between the body, migration, and her Mexican heritage, making visible the traces we carry and the spaces we inhabit. She received a BFA from Universidad Veracruzana and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Tang Teaching Museum, and galleries including Klaus von Nichtssagend and Soloway. She currently teaches at Lehman College and LaGuardia Community College (CUNY).