The International Queer/Cuir. The Void: hiv. performance. social body

In the context of the exhibition Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance, the MACBA presents The International Queer/Cuir. The Void: hiv. performance. social body, a gathering of artists and activists to discuss the current hiv/aids crisis, understanding hiv as a link that connects the different forms of violence and inequality afflicting society today. The programme seeks to temporarily fill this void through the experiences and aesthetic and discursive contributions of the invited participants.

As cultural agents we recognise that hiv/aids is a political crisis that continues to affect millions of people around the world. We respond to the renewed and perennial urgency that the recent budget cuts by the US government and other reactionary governments such as Argentina’s have brought to countries in the Global South. We see that white supremacy and hegemonic domination continue to open colonial cracks and produce inequities through necropolitics and extraction. We conceive of this programme as an attempt to collectively intervene in a constantly shifting present, drawing on the poetic and performative power of cultural agents, artists and activists called to participate.

We think of the wide Atrium of the MACBA as a void of representation around hiv/aids; and the postmodern architecture of the building as a metaphor for institutionalization and the discomforts from which the social body suffers today.

Curated by Equipo re (Aimar Arriola, Nancy Garín and Linda Valdés) and Carlos Motta, the event will take the form of a gathering of queer minds and bodies and dissident collectives to expand the imaginaries of the hiv/aids pandemic in the present, beyond hegemonic histories centred on the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, instead focusing on local and intergenerational perspectives and on experiences from the Global South.

* The Void is also the title of a work by Koray Duman, Ted Kerr and Carlos Motta on display in the corridor on the second floor as part of the exhibition Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance.

** Note: For this project, a deliberate decision to use lower case letters for hiv/aids has been made. The decision responds to the work of numerous groups that have mobilised internationally to transform the symbolic weight of these acronyms, and to mitigate the notoriety of their capitalised use.

Thursday 19 and Friday 20 June, 2025