Remembering Ricardo Rojas Toro (1955–2024)

aliwen reflects upon how their relationship with the Chilean artist Ricardo Rojas Toro reframed their understanding of aesthetic practices of survival and how and when HIV might be thought to ‘appear’ in works of painting.

This post is part of ‘Art, Visual Culture & HIV/AIDS: Local, Regional & Transnational Perspectives’ a guest-edited portfolio by Theo Gordon that collects writings from the ‘Art, Visual Culture & HIV/AIDS: Local, Regional and Transnational Perspectives’ conference hosted by the History of Art Department at the University of York in June of 2025.  Read more about the portfolio here.

The cultural history of HIV/AIDS in Latin America and beyond has often understood art through the lens of visibility. From activist graphics and public protest to memorials and collective performance, the dominant narratives of art and AIDS have often privileged works that address the public sphere directly: art as a form of confrontation. These practices are undoubtedly vital, and remain prescient in our retelling of queer artistic practices. Yet this emphasis has narrowed our imagination on art’s role during the (ongoing) epidemic, sidelining quieter forms of practice which often took the form of endurance: sustaining the self and maintaining relation, making life livable under conditions of stigma, illness, and institutional abandonment.

This essay proposes a broader recognition for the intersection of art and HIV/AIDS, by attending to the life and work of Chilean artist Ricardo Rojas Toro (1955–2024). Moving between underground performance during the Pinochet dictatorship and later art therapy practices developed while living with HIV, Rojas Toro’s trajectory unsettles the division between “political” art and “private” survival. 

By placing his seropositive life at the center rather than the margins of his artistic history, this essay argues that Rojas Toro’s practice helps reconceive art in the context of HIV/AIDS as a continuum of survival practices, functioning as representation and protest, but also as a structure of care and a mode of relation, even a technology of persistence for bodies rendered precarious by both state violence and epidemic conditions. From the underground performance scene of 1980s Chile to embodied strategies of dissent under dictatorship and later art therapy workshops, making became a form of daily maintenance infused with persistent ethical and aesthetic commitment: art as a way of remaining present, in relation, alive. Following this trajectory reveals how intimate histories and small-scale practices reshape our understanding of what has counted as “art and AIDS,” expanding it beyond visibility toward endurance, care, and shared vulnerability.

Life Lines

I met Ricardo Rojas Toro in person in 2018 while researching Art and the Seropositive Body in Contemporary Chile, an exhibition I curated as part of the Arts Forum of the University of Chile. The project sought to approach HIV/AIDS not only as a biomedical condition, but as an affective, political, and cultural experience—one shaped by desire, stigma, care, and loss. Within that framework, it felt necessary to bring together different temporalities of Ricardo’s practice: a photograph from Deutsches Requiem (1986) and a group of works he produced in the 2000s through art therapy workshops after learning of his HIV-positive diagnosis.

That curatorial decision led me to his house.

Ricardo lived in San Bernardo, in the southern periphery of Santiago, far from the institutional circuits where his image as a performer would occasionally resurface. When I arrived, he was already waiting for me at the gate of his small house, leaning on his walker. The gesture—quiet yet deliberate—made it clear that this meeting mattered to him. I had the sense that he was excited, or at least genuinely invested in that encounter.

By that time, Ricardo was living with the long-term effects of AIDS-related illness. An opportunistic cancer had affected his jaw, and he had lost part of it during treatment. As a result, communication required patience and close attention. At first, I worried about misunderstanding him, about failing to keep pace with the rhythm of his words. But as the visit unfolded, something shifted. We adapted to each other. Communication became something shared, negotiated. Inside the house, what stood out was not so much an archive of performances from the past as a lived environment shaped by care. Ricardo spoke about his participation in art workshops at Savia Foundation, where art-making functioned less as professional production than as a way of sustaining himself day by day. Art was no longer oriented toward provocation or public spectacle. It was almost a form of maintenance. A way to remain present.

As the afternoon progressed, the difficulty I initially felt to understand his words gave way to a sense of ease. We spoke about his work in the 1980s, about dance, about the upcoming exhibition. Then the conversation drifted—to music, to memories, to talking about our favorite bands. By the end of the visit, we were talking animatedly, laughing, interrupting each other.

Before I left, Ricardo gave me one of his most treasured possessions: a copy of Didactic Proposal for the Teaching of Plastic and Visual Arts, a book he had been studying closely. At that time, he was not only participating in art therapy, but also preparing himself to teach—to share tools, exercises, and forms of care with other HIV-positive peers. The gesture felt intimate and unceremonious. It was not an archival transaction, nor a symbolic offering for the exhibition. It felt instead like a form of transmission—an expression of trust and a reminder that artistic knowledge often circulates through gestures of care rather than through institutions.

Performance and Embodied Visibility Under Dictatorship

For Ricardo Rojas Toro, art was never a matter of choice, but a condition of survival. His life and work unfolded across multiple layers of vulnerability, including political repression, sexual dissidence, illness, and institutional neglect, yet his artistic practice consistently refused to disappear. Through performance and later art therapy, Rojas Toro insisted on the body as a site of memory and resistance, but also care.

Born in Santiago in 1955, Rojas Toro came of age during one of the most violent periods in recent Chilean history. His artistic formation was discontinuous and largely non-institutional. He studied graphic arts at the National School of Graphic Arts, and studied German at the Goethe-Institut, and trained in ballet at the Santiago Municipal Theatre and later contemporary dance with Hernán Baldrich. He did not complete a formal degree, yet this absence of “credentials” places him within a generation of artists whose practices developed in friction with institutional norms, particularly under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), when official cultural spaces were heavily censored and surveilled.

In dictatorship-era Chile, this reference was not an abstract allegory. The invocation of European fascism functioned as a displaced mirror of local atrocities: forced disappearances, torture, censorship, and the militarization of everyday life. Deutsches Requiem offered neither narrative closure nor moral redemption, turning instead to the dancing body in motion as a fractured, unstable surface through which power, cruelty, and vulnerability circulated in jarring flow. Rojas Toro’s performance stood out for its intensity and ambiguity. His body moved between authority and submission, masculinity and its undoing, rigidity and baroque excess. Crossdressing gestures and erotic dissonance unsettled the authoritarian codes imposed not only by the state, but by patriarchal norms governing gender and sexuality.

Seen from within its original context, Deutsches Requiem also exceeded the disciplinary boundaries of experimental dance or “expanded theater.” Its corporeal performativity aligned with a broader ecology of underground artistic practices that flourished in Chile during the 1980s in semi-clandestine conditions, often under the guise of parties, benefit events, and informal gatherings. These spaces functioned as temporary zones of encounter where performance, music, theater, and visual art converged, and where the exposed, dissident, and collective body became a primary medium of aesthetic and political experimentation.

One of the most significant of these underground spaces was El Trolley, a social center belonging to the tram and trolley drivers’ union, located on San Martín Street in downtown Santiago. Beginning in 1983, El Trolley hosted a series of events organized to fund Teatro Fin de Siglo, the theater company founded and directed by playwright Ramón Griffero in collaboration with audiovisual artist Pablo Lavín. Quickly, the venue became a key node in Santiago’s underground cultural life, operating in close proximity to the University of Chile’s Theatre School during its relocation to Morandé Street.

At El Trolley, Vicente Ruiz presented several performance art works, including the pioneering piece Hipólito (1984), while Griffero wrote and directed Teatro Fin de Siglo’s emblematic production Cinema Utoppia (1985). The feminist musical group Las Cleopatras—formed by Cecilia Aguayo, Jacqueline Fresard, Tahia Gómez, and Patricia Rivadeneira—also staged multiple performance pieces there following their formation in 1986. These events blurred distinctions between rehearsal, spectacle, party, and protest, generating a shared language of bodily excess, irony, and vulnerability that resonated strongly with the atmosphere of Deutsches Requiem.

By the late 1980s, this countercultural network expanded further with the emergence of Garage Internacional Matucana 19, which became the headquarters of the Bienal Underground (or Underground Biennial) in 1989. Founded by Vicente Ruiz in 1987 at El Trolley before being reinstated at Garage Matucana, the Underground Biennial adopted the language of international art exhibitions only to parody it from a precarious, third-world context of performance and resistance. The term “biennial” was not used to mark periodicity, but to stage a critical inversion of institutional legitimacy, asserting underground practice as a site of knowledge, urgency, and survival.

The recent passing of Vicente Ruiz invites renewed recognition of his role in sustaining these fragile infrastructures of artistic experimentation under repression. His work, like Rojas Toro’s, reminds us that Chile’s underground performance scene was not a peripheral footnote to official art and theatre history, but a vital space where bodies rehearsed other ways of being together—often at great personal risk.

During these same years, the Chilean art scene was shaped by activist practices that sought to intervene directly in the language of power. Among the most influential was Grupo CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), formed in 1979 by artists and intellectuals including visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, writers Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita, and sociologist Fernando Balcells. Working under censorship and surveillance, CADA blurred the boundaries between art, political action, and everyday life.

One of the group’s most enduring contributions was the slogan “NO+,” introduced in 1983 as an open-ended formula rather than a fixed demand. Meaning of course “NO MORE,” the phrase was deliberately incomplete, inviting collective participation: No more torture. No more hunger. No more censorship. Its strength lay in its adaptability. NO+ quickly moved beyond the art world, appearing spray painted on walls, banners, and protest signs, and becoming part of the shared visual language of dissent against Pinochet’s dictatorship. By the mid-1980s, NO+ had become widely recognizable as a civilian refusal of authoritarian violence—direct enough to be understood, ambiguous enough to circulate under repression. It functioned simultaneously as an artistic gesture and as a social tool, allowing opposition to be expressed without naming the regime directly.

This context is crucial for understanding Deutsches Requiem. During the performance, NO+ was spray-painted on the stage backdrop, collapsing the distance between choreographed action and political inscription. The slogan operated as a charged sign rather than a decorative reference, saturated with collective meaning and risk. Inserted into a work based on Borges’s Nazi narrator, NO+ anchored the European allegory firmly within Chile’s own experience of fascist violence. Moving across a stage marked by NO+, Ricardo Rojas Toro’s body became the site where conceptual refusal met physical exposure. His performance did not illustrate resistance so much as inhabit it—registering its tension, its instability, and its costs. In this encounter between slogan and body, Deutsches Requiem articulated a form of antifascism that was symbolic, certainly, but also lived.

Art as Therapy

Rojas Toro’s health deteriorated significantly during this period. Like many artists living with HIV/AIDS, his ability to access consistent employment himself through performance practice was irregular, and institutional support was scarce. Yet his artistic practice did not cease—it transformed. In the early 2000s, he became involved with Fundación Savia (Savia Foundation), an organization founded in 2001 dedicated to supporting people living with HIV through advocating access to medication, peer support, and art therapy. There, Rojas Toro began producing works that shifted away from the live, public body of performance, toward more intimate, material, and formal processes.

These later works—often made with modest or discarded materials—resist being reduced to therapeutic byproducts. They constitute an art of persistence. Collage, drawing, abstraction, and book-like formats allowed Rojas Toro to register the emotional and corporeal experience of living with HIV in a society still marked by serophobia. Religious imagery, biological diagrams, animal forms, and shifting chromatic fields coexist without resolving into stable symbolism. What emerges instead is an affective archive: less a record of events than a register of sensations and losses, along with intermittent recoveries.

Equally important was his role as an educator. Rojas Toro trained independently as an art teacher and shared creative exercises with other HIV-positive participants at Savia, emphasizing process over product and collective care over artistic validation. His practice challenges dominant narratives of politically engaged art that privilege visibility, documentation, and institutional recognition. What happens to artists after the performance ends, after the spotlight fades, and action becomes archive? Rojas Toro’s later work insists that survival itself is a creative act.

Returns and Re-assemblings

Seeing Ricardo in his home altered my understanding of the exhibition itself. Showing the photograph from Deutsches Requiem alongside his later art therapy works became less a curatorial juxtaposition than an ethical necessity. The image from 1986 is often read as an emblem of resistance under dictatorship: a body performing transgression, antifascism, and sexual dissidence. The works from the 2000s speak of another struggle, less outwardly visible but no less political—the slow labor of surviving HIV in a context shaped by stigma, precarious healthcare, and prolonged silence.

That visit continues to shape how I think about Ricardo’s work. It resists clean periodization and refuses to separate performance from what comes after: a life. Sitting with him, I understood that the most radical continuity in his practice was less stylistic than bioethical at its core: a commitment to art as a form of persistence and relation, sustained through care.

Even after I left Chile in pursuit of my graduate studies, we stayed in contact with Ricardo via social media and would sporadically message each other. Writing this piece, I went back and read some of the messages we exchanged. Toward October of 2022, he was living in an assisted care facility, and would send me links to the music he was listening to, including a compilation of arias written by Johann Sebastian Bach or an album of kalimba music by Piny Levalle. Yet his untamable spirit would sometimes feel constrained by the facility, as he let me know in a message he sent me on October 12 of that year:

Hello friend:
I am fine thank God, here just going through it, although sometimes I miss my freedom, I wish to see the ocean and eat delicious food.
Let's catch up soon, happy holidays, blessings.
Cheers,
Ricardo

He would occasionally keep me updated on his condition, and we also exchanged about his admiration of Japanese theatre and cinema and would ask me countless questions about my life on the other side of the globe.

Ricardo Rojas Toro died in early 2024. His absence from dominant Chilean art historical narratives is not accidental. It reflects the structural homophobia and serophobia that have long shaped cultural memory, as well as the precarious conditions faced by artists whose bodies do not conform to ideals of productivity, health, or longevity, yet continue in spite of them. Yet his work endures—not as a closed oeuvre, but as a reminder that art, in the hands of those pushed to the margins, is not a luxury. It is a way of staying alive. A refusal to disappear.

aliwen is a non-binary Chilean-Italian artist, writer, and curator based in Tokyo, working at the intersection of art, archives, and dissident politics. Their practice confronts the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS while centering the lived realities of transgender and gender-variant communities across Latin America and East Asia, using artivism and screenings as tools of resistance and care.

They are a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Waseda University (Tokyo), supported by the Honjo International Scholarship Foundation, and have received fellowships from the Visual AIDS Foundation (2022), MHz Curationist (2023), the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion (2025–2026), and the 10×10 Photobook Research Grant (2025–2026). Their curatorial work includes Art and the Seropositive Body in Contemporary Chile at the Museum of Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Chile, and Subversive Bodies. Art, Gender, and Media at The 5th Floor Gallery, Tokyo.

Their writing has appeared in positions: asia critique (Duke University Press), Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos (Taylor & Francis), and Mechademia (University of Minnesota Press), among others. They co-edited metttasphere: Narrating Identities Across Borders and Media (torch press, 2025).

Their upcoming essay, "Travesti Lives Are Not a Symbol," is scheduled for the Special Issue "Post/Anticolonial Queer and Transgender Studies: Radical Efflorescence from the Global South" in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke University Press, vol. 33.2, April 2027).