Let's Imagine the Cure Together: Positiva Residency

Earlier this year, nine Latin American artists came together in Quito, Ecuador as part of the second edition of Positiva Residency, organized in collaboration with Quito’s Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) and MovHIlizate. Karla Vera, a member of the Positiva team, reports on the project.

Positiva Residency is a powerful initiative that serves as a bridge for artists across Latin America to share memories, stories, and personal experiences while pursuing important vision: to imagine the cure for HIV. Nine selected artists from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Ecuador initiated an important dialogue about breaking the silence around HIV and imagining a cure together. The residency focused on how the sensitivity of art can break the barriers created by social stigma and recreate HIV culture with new images, symbols, and language.

After gathering in Quito in late March 2024, the artists began to develop an exhibition focused on HIV culture in Latin America, which opened the following month at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) in Quito. The personal experiences and intimacy they shared during the residency inspired three curatorial axes for the exhibition: archive and memory, bodies to come, and political territory.

Camila Arce

Camila Arce, an artist born with HIV in Rosario, Argentina, shared an important aspect of her personal experience as a seropositive woman in Latin America. “Half of the people in our society with the virus are women; the majority of them live in violent gender contexts—domestic or institutional violence," said Camila. The artist's work is expressed through audiovisuals, video art, and interviews of seropositive women.

Camila's artwork, Adherencia a la VIHda (Adherence to Life), explores the concepts of adherence to medication, quality of life, and feminism. The piece draws on the form of timeline but has no chronological order, emphasizing instead important social movements that do not often enter the historical narrative.. At the entrance of the gallery, she shares her experience as a person born with HIV through an audio poem reflecting on how it feels to grow up as the first generation with access to antiviral medications in South America. This poem was part of the video Memoria Vertical that was commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2022 for its Day With(out) Art video program.

Andrea Alejandro Friere

“Anyone can get AIDS.” “We love Uncle George.” “I have AIDS. Please hug me.” “She has her father’s eyes and her mother's AIDS.” Andrea Alejandro Friere’s artwork Infirmitas activates AIDS archives and cultural memory, inviting visitors to remember how HIV stigma has been historically created. Nine important archives are exhibited in the hallway of the museum, reflecting distinctive timelines that shaped how the virus is perceived socially and politically.

One such archive is the AIDS Education Posters Collection at the University of Rochester, which contains materials from the beginning of the pandemic to the present day, created with the intention of educating people about the virus and documenting the social representation of HIV. The collection contains posters in 75 different languages and dialects. Andrea intertwines the historical activation of HIV with personal archives that break through his sensitivity in Conjuro para la crear la Vida (Incantation to Create Life).

Andrea Alejandro Freire is an Ecuadorian artist from Guayaquil who is also the director of "Las Maricas no olvidamos", a cultural space that works to protect and promote archives of sexual dissidence in Ecuador.

Lucas Nunez Saavedro

What are the rituals that seropositive communities share? Beyond medical treatment, what does it mean to have HIV?

Lucas Nunez Saavedro translates medical language with their artwork. He questions the visitor with a box of antivirals that are covered with the following question: “What awaits us in the future?” From these texts, the artist selects and erases words to forge new phrases, revealing narratives hidden in the clinical language. The result is enigmatic, similar to a fortune cookie, inviting the visitor to explore the uncertainty of being seropositive. “Read your luck through my luck” is one of the artist’s phrases.

The Chilean artist currently works on death processes, pain socialization, and the repercussions of media discourses on HIV. Their video Prospects (2021) was screened by Visual AIDS as part of “Over But Not: Aftercare” in 2022.

Rodrigo Ortega

How can we actually imagine the virus outside the microscope? The virus carries personal emotions, languages, and images for everyone differently. Rodrigo Ortega is a Chilean artist and literature professor whose artwork translates the symbolic meaning of the virus into audio and visual poetics. His Imago Virus is a collection of visual poems that explores new symbols for the virus, translating its original image with photography, digital art, and screen printing. Rodrigo Ortega reconstructs HIV symbols through his own autobiography.

The virus has the form anyone wants to give it.
The virus has the image I let it.
Today the virus has the form of my mother’s smile.
No one can define the form I want to give to my virus.

— Fragments from curatorial text. “ImagoVirus”.

The artist was editor of "Erotic Life Magazine", and has published his experience as a serpositive writer in the fanzine "Este Fanzine tiene VIH", and "Primer encuentro de arte erotico" in Valdivia with his work "Simbiosis".

"My work with HIV primarily involves thinking about the aesthetic relationships between nature, the virus, and the body, analyzed through writing. I am interested in exploring ecology and how the absence of a cure accumulates sediment and materials that build up in space. I like to work with the traces left by HIV, considering how this affects our environment, bodies, and culture." — Rodrigo Ortega

Conclusion

When we imagine society without HIV, we also imagine the infinite possibilities of living without social stigma. Art has the great power of shaping contemporary dialogue about HIV and also serving as a bridge for the viewer to begin to form an intimate experience of the virus from distinctive perspectives. The nine artists who gathered for Positiva Residency not only collectively imagined a cure for HIV,but also worked to imagine a society free of discrimination. When they invite us to be part of their stories, they amplify the voices of many silenced communities around the world. Experiences, symbols, languages, and expansive forms of living communicate the distinctive realities of living with the virus.

"It is important to say that we are working towards a cure; the Latin American networks have been organizing for many years and are now reaching high-level spaces where these issues are negotiated. There is a clear vision: we do not want to live medicalized lives, but at the same time, we understand that this region is very unequal. We cannot invest in this cure if, up until now, people with HIV cannot live well, do not have access to antiretroviral treatments, universal free medications, stigma- and discrimination-free environments, and cannot fully make choices about their own bodies. - Anthony Guerrero

When I finished my interview with Ricardo Luna, director of Positiva, we talked about the identity that has been constructed for a HIV positive individual.

“There are many tensions that want us to be cured. We are tired of taking exams every two months. We want to be free, and even if we are free from these rituals, we have already constructed an identity from being seropositive. What are we going to do after the cure? Are we going to be ex-HIV positive? Because we can’t be HIV Negative, that is not an option. Being seropositives changed our life.” - Ricardo Luna

While the exhibition at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo ended September 1, 2024, Positiva Residency is not over — in fact, it has just begun. With the vision of continuing to expand throughout Latin America, the project has the intention to convert into a permanent residency for artists throughout the world that together explore the meaning of HIV, while collectively healing the wounds that have been left in their communities. Imagining the cure for HIV together has brought together people of all ages to visit an exhibition that has initiated an important dialogue in Latin America.

Seropositive or not, HIV belongs to everyone. Let’s imagine the cure together.

Article by Karla Vera

Participating Artists: Camila Arce, Luis Rojas, Juan Coronel, Andrea Alejandro Freire, Oscar Sanchez, Juan de la Mar, David Jarrin, Lucas Nunez, y Rodrigo Ortega.

Director of Positiva Residency: Ricardo Luna

Curator: Anthony Guerrero

Photography: Ricardo Luna