Exhibition of HIV-positive artists from Latin America seeks to break HIV stigma

A group of nine HIV-positive artists from seven countries in Latin America participate in an exhibition that is currently in Quito to break the stigma and discrimination around the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) through audiovisual proposals, poetry and photographs.

‘Positive. Artistic residency of Latin American HIV culture’ is a group exhibition hosted at the Contemporary Art Center (CAC) in the capital of Ecuador and in which it is evident that, to end prejudices, “it is still necessary to talk about HIV”, as the poster that welcomes the participants says. visitors.

In an intimate yet vindictive tone, this space hosts works by the CAC until the end of August. Camila Arce (Argentina), Luis Rojas (Costa Rica), Juan de la Mar (Colombia), Juan Coronel (Argentina), Oscar Sanchez (Mexico), Rodrigo Ortega (Chili), Andrea Alejandro Freire (Ecuador), Lucas Nunez (Chile) and David Jarrin (Ecuador).

The exhibition, curated by Ricardo Luna and Anthony Guerrerois a journey through the lives of artists and other people with HIV, where the radical horizon is the defense of life and the right to enjoy pleasurable sexualities free of stigma.

Self-portraits of the artists hang from the walls, as well as poems that imagine a Free life of this virus or historical posters that warned of the epidemic in the 1980s. You can also see interviews with women with HIV and an audiovisual artistic piece.

“There is a sense of community in there. “We are all very different and that makes you learn about other stories and how people live with HIV in other countries,” Camila Arce (Rosario, 1995) said in an interview with EFE about her participation in the exhibition.

“53% of the population with this virus is women”

After the artistic residency that brought together the selected artists at the CAC at the end of March to develop their proposals, Camila Arce created a timeline about the history of HIV in Latin America and interviewed several women in order to share their stories of “resilience through activism and empowerment.”

“HIV is not an issue for homosexual men,” he said, but rather “the 53% of the population with this virus is women.”

And he explained that with these interviews he was not looking for “traumatic stories,” but rather to show that the three women “They were empowered in peer groups, many of them only women,” he influenced.

However, she denounced that currently, “HIV is not on the feminist agenda,” despite the “force” that this movement has in the region, and stated that in the eighties, HIV-positive women, including her mother, were already practicing feminism without knowing it.

“They were in waiting rooms, in meetings, they founded the Argentine Network of Women Living with HIV (2002), they were being feminists and perhaps they were not aware of it“Arce noted.

Crossed by stigma

The also graduate in Social Work confessed that although the discrimination suffered by women with HIV is not the same as during the epidemic of the 1980s, they continue to be plagued by stigma.

“We experience double discrimination at work, in our private life, in our relationships,” said Arce, who also denounced “obstetric violence” and “institutional violence in the health system,” which persist both in large cities and in rural areas.

However, he also mentioned that they face other violence “that are not so visible and that have to do not only with the patriarchal system, but with living with HIV”such as recommending pregnant people not to have children.

Regarding sexual relations, he added that medical warnings “do not even give rise to talking about the undetectable and untransmittable” or to deciding what they want to do with their “bodies, such as mothering or having one or multiple partners.”

The Argentine confessed that art, along with therapy, saved her life. “Art has given me what activism has not. Activism sometimes stagnates, you can return very disillusioned from a meeting and when you find out that your colleagues die there is no place to go. In art there is where to take refuge,” she concluded.