The Seropositive Files: Visualizing HIV in Mexico
Public Program
The exhibition The Seropositive Files: Visualizing HIV in Mexico, inaugurated on February 1, 2020 at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), was the result of a mapping carried out by the Arkheia Documentation Center through the Visualities and HIV in Mexico Collection. The exhibition also included collaborations with different institutional and private collections.
Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the exhibition was cut short. Nevertheless, to give continutiy to the proposal, the MUAC held the virtual encounter Seropositivity, Resistance and Biopolitics. This event sought to spark reflections in the visual arts, activism and public health through conversations on the impact of HIV on the cultural life and the visual production in our country, especially in the context of another pandemic.
This event was dedicated to three outstanding figures in domestic and international activism, who constantly fought to defend and promote the rights of seropositive people: Luis González de Alba, Antonio Salazar and Larry Kramer.
Participants included Alejandro Brito, general director of Letra S, Sida, Cultura y Vida Cotidiana [The Letter S: Aids, Culture and Everyday Life]; Ana Amuchástegui, professor and researcher at the UAM-Xochimilco and Doctor of Philosophy from Goldsmiths College; Dr. Carlos Magis, cofounder of Conasida-Censida, researcher and doctor specialized in public health; Ricardo Baruch, activist and researcher specialized in human rights and public health, sexual diversity and HIV; and Sol Henaro, curator of the Documentary Archives, Arkheia Documentation Center (MUAC, DiGAV-UNAM).
It was moderated by Eugenio Echeverría, curator, cultural promoter and director of Centro Cultural Border; Irving Domínguez, curator and art critic specialized in issues of sexual diversity; and Luis Matus, cocurator of the exhibition The Seropositive Files.
This roundtable analyzed the recent history of actions undertaken to represent seropositive people and their identities, the social effects of the HIV-Aids crisis, mobilizations to improve government policy and the defense of the human rights of people who live with HIV.
It also addressed the role of mass media in disseminating scientific information and its normalization in everyday fields through official, moral, sensationalistic and activist discourses.
Alejandro Brito, general director of Letra S, Sida, Cultura y Vida Cotidiana [The Letter S: Aids, Culture and Everyday Life], and Ana Amuchástegui, professor and researcher at the UAM-Xochimilco and Doctor of Philosophy from Goldsmiths College, moderated by Irving Domínguez, curator and art critic specialized in issues of sexual diversity.
This conversation focused on the role of medicine, public health, clinical discoveries and advances in antiretroviral treatment as determining factors for the construction of seropositive identities and their visibility.
It went over those pioneering efforts that established organizations and public health services for people living with HIV and dialogued with those intersections between the medicalization of life and affects, visualities and artivisms so as to discuss their consequent control of seropositive bodies and the role of public health in the establishment of legal frameworks that punish transmission, as well as the appearance of moral parameters regarding the use of condoms and other prophylactics.
At the same time, two video interviews were produced: one with Rolando de la Rosa, creator of the piece Icnocuicatl Sidaids (Songs of Anguish to Aids), on her work as an artivist in the mid-nineties. The second capsule is an interview between Eugenio Echeverría and Richard Moszka on medicalization and substance use in relation to HIV and prevention policies.
