2024
We’re never done with memory.
Juliet Jacques in conversation with Élisabeth Lebovici

fierce pussy, For The Record, 2013-
56 x 86 cm, printed broadsheet. Courtesy of the artist collective.
Juliet Jacques: In 2017, you published Ce que le sida m’a fait: art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle (What AIDS Did to Me: Art and Activism at the End of the 20th Century). What made you publish the book at this point?
Élisabeth Lebovici: I was responding to my friend and colleague Patricia Falguières. She edited a collection of art historical essays, “Lectures Maison Rouge”, which consists mainly of translations of artists’ texts but also essays by critics as crucial as Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto (Self-Portrait). Originally published in Italian in 1969, this was carefully thought of as a “montage” of (mainly) Italian contemporary artists’ interviews she had recorded, used here to construct her form of self-portraiture. Through this procedure, her voice was composed of a plurality of voices, diffracting the assigned place of subjectivity in writing. Patricia asked if I would collect various essays I had written alongside my journalism at Libération. Looking back, there was this ominous presence of an absence, of HIV/AIDS and the enormous devastation it had produced, not only to me but also diffracted in the works of the artists I had been in conversation with. The writings didn’t have HIV/AIDS as a subject per se but were “living in AIDS”, as my life and my friends’ were. The artworks were, too.
It was never intended as a book “on” AIDS nor a history of artists who have worked “on” AIDS. By using the first-person singular in “What AIDS Did to Me”, I was trying to relate the process of self-making to the virus’ impact on all artistic interactions. So, behind this “me”, there’s more than just me, even if I’m talking about my experience, and it still seems to me that the “first-person discourse” is also a crucial issue. Behind this shattered, broken, diffracted “I”, undone by grief and precariousness, there is art, fragmented and ghostly. There are exhibitions, artistic practices, curatorial practices, and critical discourses. There is a geography of friendships and shadowy alliances that I posited mainly between New York and Paris, two major sites of AIDS activism in which I lived, that situate these practices along interpersonal lines.
I had no pre-established methodology. I advanced pragmatically, reading and choosing texts that I would entirely rewrite. So, the book is made of texts that are totally re-enacted or reactivated. These are ways to include the context of the now in the publication and, in a way, to feel the twenty- or thirty-year gap while blurring temporality. In 2023, we’ve been commemorating the fortieth anniversary of (French) researchers isolating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) responsible for the infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Six years ago, the publication of my book coincided with a movement to reconsider the culture of the epidemic, at least in France. It came out the day that Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. We were both in ACT UP-Paris. The huge success of the film was very helpful for the book.1
JJ: I was going to ask why there was so much reconsideration of the period and of the impact of HIV/AIDS in France at that time.
ÉL: In the 2010s, there was a generation that had never heard, or vaguely heard, about the epidemic. In the Western world, the apprehension of HIV/AIDS had changed drastically with antiretroviral treatments and PrEP, making the viral load of the epidemic literally “undetectable”.2 But I also think about the lived experience of the so-called first years and the feelings of denial, rage, grief, and fatigue that we all went through as survivors being constantly confronted to HIV/AIDS. There was a time when you might just want to forget. Thirty years later, it was time to unforget. As in “For the Record”, to quote the title of a recurring work (2010-now) by New York collective “fierce pussy”, that begins, “if he were alive today he would be at this opening if she were alive today you’d be texting her right now if he were alive today he’d be turning gray if they were alive today I wonder what pronoun they’d be using if he were alive today he’d still be living with AIDS”. Again, in the present, one continues to unravel the everyday moves through which the dead play an active, tangible role through those who are living.
JJ: I’m interested in generational memory, understanding, and historiography and how that manifests in cultural representations, partly because I made a short film about the HIV/AIDS crisis in 2017 as well. I grew up in the 1990s, understanding that something awful had happened to the queer generation before mine. I did not lose anyone to AIDS, but I was aware that the culture I was growing up in was completely shaped by it. I wonder if you have any thoughts about recent works by people like Campillo, who were there at the time, and those of a younger generation of queer artists who are trying to process the world it shaped for them.
ÉL: It is so important to acknowledge what has been done in order to ground one’s political being. I think one of the most important things to transmit is that the living, mortal body is the central object of all politics, as Achille Mbembe has stated in his concept of “necropolitics”. But this concept has a felt counterpart: a “partake of the sensible”, to use Jacques Rancière’s words, which is to convey how desperately painful and ludicrous the everyday was. An immediate effect of 120 BPM was that ACT UP-Paris saw an influx of activists returning and turning up at weekly meetings to engage in street activism – but not the less heroic and bureaucratic side of activism. This was corroborated by the media, which unanimously devoted far more pages to ACT UP than they had at the time the film was set (1989–94). For a time, the media were filled with archival images, mixing the iconography of my book with the one that was reconstructed for the film – the lack of community archives, particularly in Paris, was made blatant. I think many young queer artists empathised with the visibility of the “visual” and cultural work of AIDS activism – including the street actions, but also the posters, the flyers, the texts, the slogans, the graphics, the words, the campiness, and the political intelligence of it all at the crazy jointure between militancy, political feelings, and visual culture. Of course, the questions of representation, which were hard-won in a culture so badly treated by the dominant means by which information was processed, seem much less of a unifying paradigm: engaging with the past means more intersectionality, more intergenerational conversations.
For Exposé·es (Exposed), the show that was held recently at Palais de Tokyo based on my book, we were interested in “what the HIV/AIDS epidemic made artists do”, that is, to encourage artists to “rewrite” in their own terms certain visual or textual strategies used in the 1980–90s – by “exposing” a former work (for instance, Zoe Leonard re-enacted for the first time her intervention at Documenta 9 in 1992) or by being “exposed” to artists living with and/or who died of AIDS. It was a way to render the generational gap visible, and the set of questions framed in the present tense, hopefully in a complex relation to gender, race, authorship, and ableism, still a very problematic notion within the functioning of the art world and museums.

Zoe Leonard, Untitled, 1992. Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany, installation view. Courtesy of the artist.
JJ: I know you were in New York in the late 1970s and then came back to France. I wonder how much you felt the impact of the pandemic and when you started to feel it changing French queer culture in particular.
ÉL: I lived in New York until 1983. The impact of AIDS was rapid. A close friend in New York who suddenly wouldn’t kiss, touch, or shake hands. When I came back to France, some people I knew were already dying there. The “gay cancer” that was written about in New York or San Francisco was also talked about in Paris, which was the European city where HIV/AIDS was prevalent. After the United States, France ranked second in the number of AIDS cases among the industrialised Western countries.
For many of us, for me at least, the 80s are stories of being completely shattered. In French, we say sidération, a sudden annihilation of life forces. There’s nothing I can remember except being in permanent shock. Among my queer family, my friend Patrick was the first to get pneumocystis in 1984, before his serological status was even diagnosed. Thankfully, he wasn’t alone; we all enrolled to help with all the aspects of everyday life, whether at home or in a room at the Claude Bernard hospital, which quickly became the synonym for dying of HIV/AIDS (by the way, this hospital has disappeared, being destructed and leaving no trace behind). But this is one story I lived amongst so many others; there was somebody else before, and somebody after Patrick, and so on, and it continued constantly like that. You couldn’t deal with your own feelings; you still had to compose with the daily routine of caring for friends, who often were in total denial – because how could you tell anyone that you were meant to die soon – and who expected you to respect such denial, too. Michel Foucault’s denial is much talked about, less the unknown people who were still very much out of the closet, you know, who were fierce and flaming gays or trans but were dying in silence.
In America, these days of the epidemic coincided with the election of Reagan and then Bush. We all know what they stood for. In France, François Mitterrand, a socialist, was elected president in 1981. But I wouldn’t oppose the situation. To say things were utterly different would not be true. Yes, there was social security in France, a conquest of 1945 (like women’s suffrage), which made a difference. But the scandalous neglect and indifference with which our government treated people living with AIDS and its failure to protect gay men, intravenous drug users, sex workers, or migrants were still too powerful. The activists had to do the job in order to reclaim a place within the public healthcare system as well as to claim an “impatient”3 voice in the relationship with medical power, which was totally unbalanced. We had to assert our knowledge of our own bodies as political subjects.
JJ: Because France had recently elected a socialist government and homosexuality had been decriminalised in 1982, there was maybe a sense that the government had done gay rights and some activist demobilisation at the worst possible time.
ÉL: Exactly! The government’s message probably stood for: “We’ve done our part – don’t expect more”. The situation was an oxymoron; homosexuality was decriminalised in 1982. At the same time, not only gay men were dying, but they “were” AIDS, as if certain sexual acts identified with the foundations of a person’s identity. The language was torn between the need to fight the epidemic and the desire to preserve the gains of the 1970s sexual liberation or to keep the idea that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is a key element of self-actualisation. But, contrary to what Frédéric Martel states in his so-called “history” of homosexuality in France, I don’t see the “lateness” in LGBTQ+ mobilisation: the first activist organisation, launched by a group of “gay medics”, VLS (Vaincre le sida/Defeating AIDS), was launched in 1983. Daniel Defert, Michel Foucault’s partner, initiated the largest volunteer service provider, AIDES, in 1984; this support group was founded by gay men who refused to make homosexuality an issue in fighting the virus. Reversely, ACT UP-Paris was created in 1989 and didn’t try to “de-homosexualise” AIDS; on the contrary, its anti-establishment politics was to claim itself as the avant-garde of the gay community. So, the inner conflict and panic transformed into activism, which is not volunteering, fighting against prejudice, discrimination, and indifference. Still, we’re talking about small numbers of people and hostile reactions (including those from within the community), measuring their impact in front of a global threat.
JJ: You were writing for Beaux Arts [Magazine] at this point, yes?
ÉL: I arrived at Beaux Arts in 1986, a few days after Patrick’s death. It was a time in which many collaborators to Beaux Arts were dying – partners of the editors, writers, and photographers. Eventually, Patrice, one of the founders, died of AIDS in 1995, following his partner, Gregory. I’m not sure there was a proper obituary. I remember signatures disappearing and not a word about AIDS. As if the contributors were interchangeable, which is why claiming a voice in the first-person singular is so important in a world – the one of French newspapers – where you are forbidden to say “I”.
I left Beaux Arts and was hired to create a new art magazine (A Les Aventures de l’Art) that lasted a short time, and then I joined Libération in 1991. This newspaper also had already paid an enormous, horrendous tribute to the epidemic. But the situation was different. Through its contributors, the daily newspaper had been involved in the 1970s homosexual (and trans) emancipation movements. Since the 1980s, there had been some first-person reports of living with AIDS (“Me and my HIV/AIDS” by Pierre Chablier, 1989–1994). One journalist, who was also an HIV-positive doctor engaged in fighting the epidemic (Gilles Pialoux, writing as Gilles Pial from 1984 to 1990), was given the task of “following” the AIDS crisis. After him, there was, for a long time, one correspondent who reported exclusively about HIV/AIDS and occasionally about activist actions.
JJ: How did you become involved with ACT UP-Paris? How much did Larry Kramer and the US version influence it, and what was specific to France?
ÉL: I joined ACT UP in 1993 or 1994. I had already been to various LGBTQ+ Pride marches, always walking with a small group of AIDS activists. It was just after ACT UP-Paris had installed a gigantic pink condom covering the Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde. A friend, Francis, got me in. He was the editor of a magazine; he wouldn’t disclose his HIV status, but his co-workers found out and subjected him to all kinds of petty acts. He went to one of ACT UP-Paris’ weekly meetings and told me how fantastic it was, how the intelligence in the collective riveted him, and their practical ways of dealing incredibly wisely about things. A week later, I came with him. The “facilitators” that introduced you to the organisation and its practices used to say as welcoming words that “ACT UP was stemming from the homosexual community”. I felt an incredible relief when I heard this. My friend didn’t stay. I did. I was home. I learned so much through ACT UP: I became a feminist, I performed queerness, I became attentive to the dispersal of fluxes of power throughout all the cracks and crevices of the social system that Foucault called “the microphysics of power”.
In Paris, the ACT UP chapter first appeared during the Pride march of 1989, conceived in a Parisian apartment by three gay journalists (there were other chapters in France). One of them, also ACT UP-Paris’ first president, Didier Lestrade (a columnist at Libération), had visited New York numerous times since 1987. He was very influenced by Larry Kramer. Although ACT UP-Paris was a non-profit organisation, it was largely inspired by its New York counterpart. Both envisioned HIV/AIDS as a political epidemic. Both intended to respond radically and creatively. The early slogans and visuals were shared and translated, as was the activist “genius” (the weekly meetings, the consensus-reaching discussions, the working committees, the urge to read and make knowledge largely available) or concentrated in the methods (civil disobedience, “zaps” or “die-ins”), and their conscious use of the media. But the notion of “community” was very different in France. Mainstream political values, encapsulated in the rhetoric of “French Republicanism”, demonised organisations that made demands based on race, gender, sexual affinities, or religion (and still do). It was by recognising France as a universalist country that refuses to acknowledge the contribution of its minorities, thus continually erasing its colonial past, that ACT UP-Paris took as a base for its politics, based upon the idea of an “AIDS community”.
JJ: Some prominent writers born in France and expats like Copi and Severo Sarduy were lost, and Hervé Guibert’s writing about illness in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life was notable. How aware were you of the impact on French literature, and how important did you feel creative writing to be in creating a public discussion?
ÉL: Prominent (male) philosophers such as Michel Foucault, whose work became one of the most valuable references for understanding and resisting the disease, were much more invoked. There weren’t so many writers who were part of the conversation; Copi or Sarduy addressed a particular audience. Hervé Guibert is not the same. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life was huge when published because it became a kind of counterexample for activists. Why? Of course, because he outed the fact that Foucault died of AIDS. But also, Guibert was seen as tracing a link between gay sex and the suffering of HIV/AIDS, as if AIDS was the ultimate meaning of gay sex. The very idea that the scandal of the epidemic had meaning infuriated activists. Guibert’s work had to be transported to New York thirty years later in a series of translations and exhibitions that revisited his photographs and writings without their original context. This is how a younger generation is now reading and looking at Guibert. The other writer who had an incredible impact and still does is Guillaume Dustan, raising an even more purulent controversy (around safe sex and bareback sex).
“Remembering is not simply an act of memory”, says Vinciane Despret. “It’s an act of creation.” Such was 95 by my friend Philippe Joanny, published last spring. It’s an AIDS memorial through a narrative that revisits and revives Philippe’s group of LGBTQ+ friends and lovers, all living with or in HIV/AIDS in Paris in 1995, in one of the deadliest moments of the epidemic. The novel’s timeframe is a week between the death by overdose of one of these friends and his ludicrous burial after his corpse has been appropriated by his estranged bio-family. Sometime after these events, Philippe had recorded an oral history from each remaining member of his queer family. Since then, most of them have died, and their meeting places – the bars, clubs, and sexual zones of the Marais district in Paris – are long gone. It took Philippe years to use these interviews as creative material for writing a novel, trying to give back fictionally, with the form and resources of writing, a shared culture.


Catherine Lord, To Whom It May Concern (2012). Installation photograph, ONE Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Courtesy Nori Minami.
2.Catherine Lord, To Whom It May Concern, 2012 (detail)
JJ: Let’s move on to visual art.
ÉL: What really touched me during Exposé·es was the number of people coming to me, the “mediators”, the guards, or even other visitors, and addressing us the same way. “You know, my uncle, my parent’s comrade, my neighbour, my teacher, my sister, etc.” Each time, specifically naming someone linked to the person’s intimate trauma, overwhelmed by emotion. This continuous flux of personal stories with HIV/AIDS was affecting us too. It shifted my judgement of what exhibitions could do in a public institution. Every visitor had a story that had been triggered and unravelled by the experience of a work.
I loosely wish to link such experience of a “counter-public” in the show to a chapter of my book organised around “dedication”. Since the 1980s and 1990s, many works of art have been dedicated to someone. A name, a forename, is suddenly Shining Forth4 as a gift, as a present produced by the work of art and connected to the labour of making it. You see that in the AIDS Quilt, aka the “Names Project” (“Le Patchwork des noms”). You see that in Catherine Lord’s project, in which she considered queer dedications as paratext juxtaposed by the author to literary texts (“To Simone de Beauvoir, who Endured”; “for my sisters in the trenches”, etc.). You see that with artists such as Félix González-Torres, who used “Untitled” but often named someone in parenthesis (Untitled [to Ross; or For Roni]). Even Zoe Leonard in Exposé·es dedicated part of her work to me. You see that in Nan Goldin’s use of the first name, never the family name, which signals her closeness towards the people she photographs. One of the most striking pieces in the show was dedicated to my friend Philippe Thomas, an artist whose strategy was to relinquish the authorship of his works and endow it to the addressees of such works, who became its authors and were registered and indexed as such. So, in a way, he was enacting the process described as the “Death of the Author” – an incredibly cruel destiny for someone actually dying of AIDS – but, in another way, it was also relying on a diffracted community of people to continue living with Thomas’ work and to be in continual care of the life of Thomas’ work. Isn’t it a queer way of making?

AIDS Memorial Quilt, 2022 –
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Courtesy AIDS Memorial.
JJ: You mentioned González-Torres and Goldin, who are well-known artists dealing with the epidemic. I wonder if you feel some sort of canon has formed around artistic responses to HIV/AIDS. I wonder if there’s more work to be done to question that canon or to change it and what that might look like.
ÉL: Of course, certain works are canonical – to the point of “representing” AIDS. But one should affirm their fame even more when you hear about the “de-AIDS-ing” or “de-queer-ing” process that posthumously affects such work. And inheriting such works as cultural icons doesn’t forbid pushing them on their margins or out of their frame. Let me give two examples. In Exposé·es, we had González-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Julie Ault) (1991) augmented by five HIV+ and AIDS survivor activists who, with Julie’s authorisation, amplified the portrait by adding dates and events significant for them, and in French. Jesse Darling created an incredible work with material that is always kept invisible: the candy papers, light bulbs, and beads remaining from recent Félix González-Torres’ shows, thrown alongside the Palais de Tokyo’s trash and paper correspondence in two large light boxes. For Darling, it was also a way to revive the multitude of anonymous people who didn’t make it to the AIDS canon.

Jesse Darling, Reliquary (for and after Félix González-Torres, in loving memory), 2023.
Exposé.es, installation view. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo.
In my book, I wanted to fight not only for the non-canonical, for the collectives or individuals who didn’t identify as artists, but also for the works that were not authored as such. I also wanted to open an equal space to us, as lesbians, cis or trans, who have indeed played a continuous role in AIDS activism and mourning, even during the times of forgetting that I alluded to earlier, even during the 2010s. When you think about Gregg Bordowitz’s timeless banner, “The AIDS crisis is still beginning”, that’s also what comes to mind. That history is constantly beginning. We’re never done with memory. But we’re never done with erasure, either. The very powerful text by media theorist Alexandra Juhasz, which can also be applied to the French-speaking context, says it all: “When we remember ACT UP as the pinnacle of postmodern activism, we forget other forms and activist forums from the same period – practices that were linked, related, simply modern, in dialogue, or even in opposition to the conflictual activism of ACT UP.” I’m constantly reminded that every time a closet is put in the open, many others close.
The same year, gay cinema historian Didier Roth-Bettoni published Les Années sida à l’écran (The AIDS Years on Screen), ErosOnyx, Paris, 2017.
Marika Cifor, “Status = Undetectable: Curating for the Present and Future of AIDS”. Available at: https://on-curating.org/issue-42-reader/status-undetectable-curating-for-the-present-and-future-of-aids.html#.X33fSS8ivOQ, accessed November 2024.
“We condemn attempts to label us as ‘victims’, a term which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally ‘patients’, a term which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are ‘People With AIDS’.” (Denver Principles, 1983:https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/1983_denver-principles_en.pdf, accessed November 2024).
The title of a painting by Barnett Newman commemorating his brother (https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/czAAorg), accessed November 2024.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Élisabeth Lebovici is an art historian and art critic based in Paris. She became a chief editor of Beaux Arts Magazine (1987-90) and an arts editor for the daily newspaper Libération from 1991 to 2006. She was a lecturer at Sciences-Po and organised seminars in EHESS and L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She was a member of ACT UP-Paris, the first president of the LGBTQI Paris film festival, and an archival research member at the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir (travellingfeministe.org). She blogs at le-beau-vice.blogspot.com. She has written numerous monographs, and her work grapples with gender and sexuality, as well as the relationships between feminism, AIDS activism, queer politics, and contemporary art. She curated the exhibition Exposé·e·s at Palais de Tokyo (2023) based on her book Ce que le sida m’a fait, 2017.