Projection followed by a talk with researcher and curator Julien Ribeiro
Since 1989, coinciding with the World Health Organization’s World AIDS Day on December 1, the nonprofit organization Visual AIDS has mobilized the art world around the Day With(out) Art project, as a call for “mourning and action in response to the AIDS crisis” launched from New York, through various interventions in United States, in museums, galleries, and public space. Then, from 2010, Visual AIDS has begun a collaboration with today’s artists and filmmakers to create a short films program toward HIV/AIDS, in order to raise awareness about the pandemic, and support the artists living with AIDS.
For 2022, Visual AIDS presents “Being & Belonging”, a program of seven short videos from artists living with HIV across the world. From navigating sex and intimacy to confronting stigma and isolation, “Being & Belonging” centers the emotional realities of living with HIV today. How does living with HIV shift the ways that a person experiences, asks for, or provides love, support, and belonging? The seven videos are a call for belonging from those that have been stigmatized within their communities or left out of mainstream HIV/AIDS narratives.
These seven original films have been directed by Camila Arce (Argentina), Davina « Dee » Conner and Karin Hayes (United States), Jaewon Kim (South Korea), Clifford Prince (United States), Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta Huntertexas (Colombia), Mikiki (Canada), and Jhoel Zempoalteca and La Jerry (Mexico).
What’s Your Flavor collective, initiated in 2014 as a programming platform for LGBTQI + experimental films linked to the Collectif Jeune Cinéma, has joined Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research to relay Visual AIDS initiative in France, where the films will be shown and debated the same way they are in various institutional spaces, in United States and beyond.
Julien Ribeiro
An anthropologist by training, Julien Ribeiro is the curator and founder of the Lavoir Public, a creative space dedicated to changing writing in Lyon, which he directed until 2016. He works on the impact of politics on our lives and on our creative processes, the place of minorities playing a central role in this research. A founding member of the WAW collective (LGBTQI archive and contemporary art), he is associated with the programming of the exhibition David Wojnarowicz – History Keeps Me Awake at Night at the Mudam (2019) and is notably part of the monitoring committee for the exhibition Histoire et mémoires des luttes contre le VIH/sida (2021) at the Mucem in Marseille. Since 2020, he is a member of Curatorial Hotline. He is currently working on “silent” knowledge, the disease as a partner as a curator associated with the Antre-Peaux (Bourges) and more generally on new forms of knowledge transmission. He is in charge of the “AIDS and cultures” section of the magazine Remaides. He was a laureate of the 2021 Cité internationale des arts in collaboration with the Cnap, where his research focused on the links between restorative justice and aesthetics. Today, he is working on different projects, including Expanded Scream with Stéphane Roussel, an exhibition about screams, their representations and their reception in art history. From September 2022, he will be the associate artist at the Université de Lille in the framework of the Airlab residency with the support of Le Fresnoy in order to start a research around Cookie Mueller, queer temporalities and collaborative translation. From December 2022, he will be resident again at the Cité internationale des arts to continue his research.
