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@whatsnotover
“AIDS is a social phenomenon and as such repeatedly enters into the field of representation, always as something else, recombined, with new meanings. The direct experience of AIDS exceeds representation. AIDS is always more than an image — it is an appearance, a visitation…” Gregg Bordowitz, General Idea: Imagevirus
An Origin: Feminist Art
Work by L.J. Roberts
An Origin: Radical Faeries
photo by Quito Zeigler
In order to keep the NOT OVER discussion alive, we created a facebook group. It is used to share articles, news and events related to NOT OVER.
NOT OVER FACEBOOK GROUP
After our 3 week NOT OVER series concluded, we got an email from Cyd Nova, a San Francisco based activist who wondered if we were cool with them putting on a one day NOT OVER event in San Fran. "YES" we said.
Here is audio, provided by KPFA Women's Magazine that provides highlights from the event.
L.J. Roberts and Ted Kerr spoke about NOT OVER on the radio program ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP.
AN ORIGIN: ACT UP ORAL HISTORY project.
AN ORIGIN: Trauma and Grace by Serene Jones, a book that explores the importance of story telling in dealing with collective trauma.
AN ORIGIN: Spirit and Trauma by Shelly Rambo, a book that looks at the impact of collective trauma and how to live with it.
NOT OVER: You, Me, Us and AIDS
Part 2: Living with HIV
Response to Part 2.
Visual AIDS intern Eliza Sprague attended Part 1 and responded:
What can art do? Earlier this month Visual AIDS director Amy Sadao posed a version of this question to a roomful of HIV/AIDS activists during the final session of QuoRum Forum’s discussion series Not Over: You Me Us & AIDS. Truthfully, I didn’t give the query much thought,yet it remained in the back of my mind.
I create to feel alive. I sing because it is allows me to express the deepest parts of myself. I write because it centers me, allows me to process thoughts that may never have fully formed unless I transferred them from my brain to my fingertips. I create because it is so fantastically fun. I love the journey through the, at once familiar, and the wild lands of uncharted territory. I crave the adrenaline that arises from a mixture of excitement and fear. Creating with others, sharing ideas and experiences, and opening up to the uncertainty of so many ideas feeds into my sense of adventure.
I feel the same way about activism. Bottom line, I love adventures, I love challenges and puzzles and the sweet fear that comes with the uncertainty of success. I love to believe in things. I want to make life better for people. If I can use what I love to make other people happy, I get to both have a wonderful time, and feel great about myself! Win-win right?
Except that caring deeply about something comes with a price. The more invested I get, the more I allow my emotional connection to trump the sense of challenge, and the more painful the inevitable setbacks and failures become. When every passing day without universal access to ARVs, and with the looming threat of the inevitable destruction of the ecosystems I love, begin to feel like a punch in the stomach, my excitement turns to anxiety—and then exhaustion.
Writer and activist Che Gossett described the call to activism as a ‘visceral response to do something.’ Activism is not a purely logical activity. It is at its core an emotional one, based on a felt need to change something that is a weakness within our community. We seek to be not only the shakers of society, but also the builders of a better world. We cannot then disassociate ourselves from the practical and emotional impacts of our work, either personally or professionally. So how do we balance the two? How do we balance our deep conviction and belief in the issues we seek to address while maintaining the energy, creativity and courage necessary to continue fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds?
The evolution of AIDS activism in New York City is a fascinating example of a community attempting to address this problem. The intensity of the trauma associated with HIV/AIDS along with the close relationship between artists and AIDS activists has resulted in a movement that is unusually conscious of the need to provide a healing space for both those it seeks to help, and those involved in fighting the disease. AIDS work requires, and has therefore come to include that space, supporting the personal work as well as the political, in dealing with the effects of HIV. Art has played an integral role in shaping the psyche of the movement, and has been essential in cultivating psychological sustainability.
The mid-nineties and early twenty-first century encompassed a period of deep therapeutic growth within HIV/AIDS activist communities chiefly led by art-based organizations that both preserved the histories of communities and individuals lost in the epidemic, and provided space for communal and individual catharsis. In supporting the work of artists living with HIV, organizations like Visual AIDS allowed these individuals to focus on the process of healing through creation, and cultivated communities that could validate their experiences, and facilitate dialogue.
As the AIDS crisis continues and economic hardship force service organizations and advocates to’ get creative’ in their efforts, the lessons of the last decades will become essential to the sustainability of the movement and those who take part in it.
The presence of art within this community has given us the tools, and awareness to deal with our own emotional wellbeing, and the needs of the community. Artistic expression allows us to experience inspiration, joy, pain and grief encased within an act of creation. Instead of suppressing, or becoming bogged down in emotions, this creation expresses them while simultaneously producing energy that pulls us into further action, and increases our sense of camaraderie and empathy. We can then connect to the underlying importance of the work without allowing the magnitude of our responsibility to become paralyzing. These qualities breed movements that succeed not only in the short term, but endure through years of struggle and turmoil.
For me, activism is at its heart an adventure. It is not a cold logical advance towards change, nor is it a constant passionate diatribe of ‘the way things ought to be.’ Adventure requires action as well as inspiration, creativity and courage under-laid with a passion for the truths sought, and the work that must be done. The adventure and challenge activism provides, and the requirements of creativity and courage are reflected in the process of making art. That personal creation informs and makes possible the work we undertake in the outside world.
So while I still don’t know how I would respond to Amy’s question of what can art do, I know that art does something.
Eliza Sprague is a student at Bennington Collage. She was an intern at Visual AIDS, and is now interning with Housing Works.
NOT OVER: You, Me, Us and AIDS
Part 1: Intergenerational Storytelling
Photos by L.J. Roberts
Response to Part 1.
Visual AIDS intern Eliza Sprague attended Part 1 and responded:
When I was asked to share some thoughts on the Intergenerational Storytelling Hour, part one of the three-part forum series Not Over: You, Me, Us & AIDS, I thought it would be easy. For days I struggled with how best to represent this forum, to explain why it was so important, why I left with tears in my eyes and a smile on my face, and why I suddenly felt so close to people that I had met only hours before.
I almost didn’t make it to the forum. I hesitated at the door and even as I took my seat and waited for the talk to begin I questioned whether hearing stories of such intense pain and pervasive loss were really the best thing for me. But when artist and activist Sur Rodney Sur began to speak, sweeping us into the world of 1980s-90s New York City, I forgot to be afraid. I let the story pull me in and temporarily set aside my self-protective vigilance.
Both Sur and second speaker, artist Kate Huh, painted pictures of a crisis taking place within a deeply communal world. They described the 1980s-90s as era of ‘socialization without technology,’ in which the only way to make connections was to leave the safety of home. Communities sprang up around local watering holes and copy shops, and these allowed for the development of strong, intergenerational social networks that could both organize and support one another as the AIDS crisis grew.
The availability of life-prolonging treatment for HIV has returned the option of disclosure to many living with the disease who would in the past have been unable to hide their illness. A generation of weary activists and survivors has been allowed a rest from the war-like realities of the epidemic and public discussions of personal struggles with HIV/AIDS have diminished. Conversations about one’s own serostatus are rare even within the relative safety of HIV clinics, in which an ‘assumed anonymity’ carries the understanding that ‘you’re not going to talk about serostatus or AIDS.’ This culture of disclosure acts as both a source of protection and of isolation. Yet as a new wave of young people struggles to piece together a history obscured by the decimation of a generation of queer and artistic communities, they have begun to question this lack of communication, and to ask for the stories and experiences of both those who have lived (and still live) with HIV, and those who have loved them. And so we found ourselves in a forum moving fluidly between discussions of the HIV/AIDS community to remembrances and celebration of those loved and lost during the first chapters of the AIDS crisis, each speaker allowing us tiny glimpses into the worlds in which they lived and the people we would never know. I braced myself as artist Eric Rhein and writer/performer Hana Malia prepared to address the topic that I had dreaded most, that all along I feared would break my fragile psyche into pieces; they began to speak of their enduring love for those they had lost. I have never been good at dealing with loss. In an effort to avoid depression and paralysis I have buried my sadness deep under layers of spiritual rationalization and indifference. What was ‘meant to be’ would be, and all I had to do was keep moving. It was an unsustainable strategy at best, and the last year of my life has been an exercise in acknowledging its futility.
In Rhein and Malia’s stories I expected to feel the same sense of helplessness, the caged grief petrified in my inability to accept reality and the continuing sensations of missing someone so much that all I wanted to do was collapse on the ground and stay there forever. But in their stories of happy times spent with departed loved ones, in the subtle beauty of Rhein’s wire leaves depicting the lives and characters of people he had known, I felt more than grief. I felt the joy of their memories and the peace of acknowledging their continued existence. I could shed tears at the pain of those who spoke without feeling drowned in either their sadness or my own.
Too often we fear to speak our pain, believing that conjuring up those emotions and re-experiencing trauma will only prolong our suffering. Burying the pain and moving on feels much safer than displaying our wounds. Yet I know now that I, at least, cannot heal alone.
At the start of the forum, each of us introduced ourselves by stating what we expected from the meeting. Some came to support friends; others to ‘deal.’ Some came to better understand the history of the queer community within the context of HIV/AIDS. But almost every single person stated that they had come to ‘hear stories’. Within these stories we found hope. We found an outlet for our grief. We found the chance to construct community out of history. Fully formed human lives blossomed out of the images and words of our speakers. I left feeling as if I had met the late dancer and performer John Burn of whom Huh spoke, the fashion designer Gayle Kirkpatrick with whom Sur had shared a long and close friendship, and a host of others whose memories we celebrated over the course of three hours.
As I listened to the stories of celebration and grief, of humor and unblushing truth, I felt something inside me shift. It surprised me, yet perhaps I should have expected it. It was pain without despair. It was sitting in a fire and finding that the flames did not burn. It was a kind of safety I could only have experienced through the collective support of my peers.
Hana Malia’s final words best captured my feelings on that day: “I am grateful for having had people who loved me enough to make the loss of them this vivid.” The greatest gift of this forum lay in allowing us to experience the fullness of that gratitude.
Author Bio:
Eliza Sprague grew up in Evanston, Illinois. Coming of age during the years of intense international and local conflict that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Eliza has spent the better part of her young adult life exploring the factors that shape society in an attempt to understand the realities of our current struggles as well as our successes as a global community. Eliza has studied overseas in Costa Rica, India and Scotland through an international studies program called Global College. For the last two years she has studied sociology and community development at Bennington College, from which she will graduate this June. She is currently interning with Visual AIDS and Housing Works in NYC.
Part 3: LIVING WITH HIV
Saturday, February 4, from 1-3 pm
Orientation (Bark) Room, New School, Ground Floor, 2 W. 13th St The epidemic of HIV and AIDS touches all parts of our lives from our intimate relationships with ourselves and others, to the way we access healthcare, participate in the economy and politics, have sex, consume culture, and generally move through the world.
The town hall style meeting brought together a diverse group of people to share contemporary experiences on how HIV shapes our lives, the work we do, and the way we form identity and community.
It featured Amy Sadao of Visual AIDS; Che Gossett of ACT-Up Philadelphia; Amanda Lugg, Director of Advocacy and Mobilization of the African Services Committee ; Laura Whitehorn, senior editor at POZ Magazine; and Michael Tikili of The Global Access Project of Health Gap.
Part 2: UNTITLED (film screening)
Saturday, January 28, from 1-3 pm
Kellen Auditorium, New School
Main floor, 66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street
We screened, UNTITLED, a non-linear 60 minute film by Jim Hodges, Encke King, and Carlos Marques da Cruz, placing HIV / AIDS within the context of national and international moments.UNTITLED is a people’s history of the last 30 years with AIDS at its center.
After the screening we debriefed the impact of AIDS on our collective history, and together we discussed how we understand ongoing AIDS impacting our lives today, and into the future.
It was a heady discussion in which people made connections between the war in Iraq, the Rodney King bombing, their own sense of isolation, and HIV/AIDS.
Part 1: INTERGENERATIONAL STORY TELLING HOUR
Saturday, January 21 from 1-3pm
Organized in part with Dan Fishback Kellen Auditorium, New School Main floor, 66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street Queers who died of AIDS in the 80′s and 90′s were remembered with stories and performances by their surviving friends and admiring descendants.
Artists from the community shared performances that reflected on lost history and its current impacts. Part 1 featured Eric Rhein, Sur Rodney Sur, Kate Huh, Jack Waters and Hana Malia. The audience participated by sharing stories of lost loved ones, ghosts and friends we lost.
NOT OVER marketing.