2024
Arc-HIV-ing - Scenes in Process

AIDS Memorial Quilt, 2022. Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Courtesy of AIDS Memorial.
1
In March 2023, at one of the events organised by Élisabeth Lebovici as part of the major exhibition on art and HIV in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, I became engulfed, once again, in an intense archival present. In this event, one of the series titled “Les Pointes perché·es”, Lebovici had invited the members of the feminist collective “fierce pussy”. Made up of Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka, “fierce pussy” were intensively engaged in AIDS activism in 1990s New York. In many ways, they reconceived their collective, as well as the form of their work, through that experience. The history of “fierce pussy” is in itself a big chapter in AIDS art and, one after the other, its members started speaking, in low, reflective voices, about a period in which to make art, to care for friends, to act collectively, and to rethink representation as both a political and as an artistic aim were intertwined processes. I recognise this mode of address; I have heard it before – anyone who collects oral histories from the epidemic or has been to similar public events knows this tone of voice, decisive in its delivery of testimony but also careful, low-pitched, reflective of the immensity of a story that is never fully told.




Exposé-es, 2023, exhibition view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo.
2.3. 4. Les Pointes perché·es, 2023. 5 conversations hosted by Élisabeth Lebovici and François Piron. Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Quentin Chevrier.
Yet what I want to share is something that happened after the members of “fierce pussy” started speaking. Using coloured chalk, a collective of young artists began sketching, on the walls around the audience, a visual representation of what we were listening to as well as the event itself. They were portraying the speakers and us listening, but also their words, memorable phrases, the cognitive maps of the stories they were sharing, information, images or persons, and names linked to other names. As the wall space was limited, they would at times erase previous sketches to replace them with new information.1 We were suddenly becoming surrounded by a web of images and words, a palimpsest of memories and events. As the references were multiplying and new sketches started being drawn on top of others, this mural was becoming something more than a response to the talks. There we were, seeing a palimpsest unfolding in front of us, fully aware of its depth, expansiveness, as well as the sense of precarity and transitoriness. We were not being told about the Archive of HIV; we were experiencing an exercise in form and content within it. We were not so much seeing the visualisation of specific information as we were being inducted into a practice. For want of a better word, I would like to call this practice ArcHIVing.
2
In her essay “Pictures from an Epidemic”, artist and activist Mary Patten returns to the organised actions that ACT UP, the legendary anti-AIDS activist organisation, became famous for. She is right in saying that “ACT UP did not always acknowledge our social movement predecessors. Direct action, street theatre, and media genius were not ‘invented’ by us. ACT UP inherited much from the women’s liberation, civil rights, Black Power, and anti-apartheid movements – all of which succeeded, for a brief moment, in subverting business as usual, deploying the rhetoric of personal transformation and social revolution, and visualising a literal ‘turning inside out’ through demonstrations, media spectacles, and struggles for power.”2
It was through appropriation and invention, Patten explains, that “ACT UP created a theatre of our bodies in the public sphere, shifting the spectacle of AIDS. Our contribution was to smear the dichotomies between ‘private’ and ‘public’ life, between our bodies, our sexualities, our desires, and our socio-political selves.”3
I am reading this all-familiar story, and I keep thinking how today one can ask a similar question, but this time focusing on the legacy of AIDS activism: how much does today’s radical political action and activism owe, whether it acknowledges it or not, to old AIDS activism? Think of the fights for new forms of citizenship and inclusiveness, for democratic biocitizenship and patients’ rights, and for gender equality and sexual identity. What is it that the HIV/AIDS and the socio-cultural and community fight against the virus and its stigma have taught us? Or, to recall Élizabeth Lebovici’s phrase in the title of her brilliant book, what has AIDS done to us?4
The answer cannot be singular or narrow, of course. It can be processual, almost pedagogic – as was the case of the French film 120 BPM, directed by Robin Cabillo (2017), which narrated scenes from the history of the ACT UP-Paris. The director reconstructed, almost scene by scene, famous images, interventions, media appearances, and demonstrations of ACT UP-Paris. To do this, he employed his own and his community’s memories, stacks of official and unofficial archives, but most importantly, perhaps, a group of actors, many of whom were (or were ready to become) politically involved in contemporary fights for memory, justice, and identity. Reconstruction of scenes from the past did thus take the form of a re-training in a contemporary “theatre of bodies” similar to what ACT UP had created in the past. And it is not coincidental that several recent LGBTQ+ archival projects in France and elsewhere mention the film’s release as a pivotal moment of inspiration and renewal of interest in AIDS archives and memory.
The exploration of what we owe to AIDS activism today can also be immersively but also intersectionally autobiographical. Watching the magnificent documentary on Nan Goldin’s activist fight against opioids in America, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (dir. Laura Poitras, 2022), one realises the importance of a life spent engaged in AIDS activism as well as the role of art in that fight. Goldin shares this (past) experience with her comrades now, beautifully, almost between words and actions (or, through sometimes her tired but so decisive posture), in this new fight for patients’ rights and the right to know, for biocitizenship and the ethics of cultural institutions.
The answer to what we owe to the fight against HIV/AIDS can, crucially, also be explosive and explosively metonymical. This is what happened in the wide mobilisations after the murder of transqueer and AIDS activist Zak Kostopoulos, aka Zackie Oh, in Athens in 2018. Suddenly, as silent vigils, lie-ins, and street-performance demonstrations were organised almost every day that October in Athens (and were repeated often in the next years), as new graffiti stencils filled Athens overnight, the link to a certain tradition of AIDS activism was not advocated or even explored. It was there, as a given, as a legacy not only of the person mourned but, most importantly, of their fearless politics.5
What I call ArcHIVing is itself made of such forms of practice: all these pedagogies, all these immersions in the rich history of HIV/AIDS, all these communal and agonistic reflections on what it has done to us.
3
Patten includes a piece of her art as illustration in the article I have just quoted at length. It is a work whose directness and simplicity I find numbingly moving: a black leather notebook, open on two pages that you first think are empty, blank. Only that, once you look more closely, you realise they are all covered with white correction fluid; these pages must have contained addresses and telephone numbers, names of people, which are all now erased as they have passed away. The title and description of the piece say it all. “Mary Patten, Untitled (names and addresses): 1994, 10-year-old address book, correction fluid.”

Mary Patten, Untitled (names and addresses), 1994, whited-out address book, 22,86 x 16,51 cm (open) © Mary Patten
It is a memorial to friends and acquaintances who have been lost but also to the gaps, the open holes of information left by the loss of interest, the archival erasure, and the inescapable taxonomies within the remaining archives. Patten glosses it brilliantly: “After a period of only six or seven years, a condensed lifetime for many of us, the literal disappearance of so many friends, lovers, and community people – who had joined the horribly escalating numbers of the dead – began to collapse into the erasure of our images in the media. We dropped out of sight. This produced another hole in our midst, another empty space; we were literally being chalked out.”6
How do you archive that empty space, that gap? How do you unearth the lost information? How can you bring a rich history back into sight? I have been writing similar questions in my notebook for some time now, albeit in a much more recent period, in a much more local context, and in different circumstances. In the last three years or so, a group of colleagues and I, in collaboration with “Positive Voice”, the Association of People Living with HIV in Greece, have been involved in a project we call “HIV/AIDS in Greece: A Political Archive”. Our aim has, first and foremost, been to refocus on the social, political, and community history of HIV/AIDS in Greece and, when possible, to address the gaps in this history in the public sphere. We are trying to assemble an archive of artefacts, memorabilia, and other material, a repository of oral histories, and a series of public events that will themselves act as a continuing platform to remember, record, and archive. The reason we called this “a political archive” relates to the difficulty of this endeavour, and to its repercussions for social citizenship today in Greece.7

Αthens Pride, on the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the HIV epidemic, Positive Voice, the Association of people living with HIV/AIDS. Photo: Vlassis Chrysopoulos
Working on this project in Greece, in many ways, you feel like you are involved in archiving silence; impossibility (and lost material); censorship. Thus, in a recent study on the art, performance, and theatre performances related to HIV in Greece, we started by enumerating the lost material that we came across – lost and found as lost. We called the study “Censorship as cultural history”, arguing that it is worth talking about what is missing, performances that did not leave a “full” archival trace, photographs that have been destroyed, diaries that have never seen the light of day. All that work of revisiting, even if it is revisiting gaps, silences, and apparitions, becomes, in this case, a very powerful social and cultural history.8 It can be a history of what we have not got (for instance, in Greece, we have not had a notable film on the experience of the first decades of the epidemic). But it can also be a history of gaps that, themselves, invite the various, peculiar, alternative, and inventive ways of filling them.9 One has to be alert to (and ready to redeploy) “unusual record-keeping formulations re-membering lost artists, […] artifactual stand-ins, visual surrogacies, object networks, and dispersed fragments”.10
How do you practise archiving when you are confronted with silence, impossibility, un-archiveness? For answers, one could turn again to Mary Patten’s address book, its contents erased, under erasure, painted over. Because, of course, one could see this address book, and with it the whole archive of HIV/AIDS, as a palimpsest: scratching on the white “empty” surface, you find, below, names, experiences, memories, lives, togetherness. As with the “corrected” address book, you can also see this as a gesture, at the same time, to archive the gaps: to show the act of missing, to memorialise the losses, but also to underline the silencing, the painting over, the erasures, and to try to understand their social production. Last but not least, as with every text that has been painted over with white correction fluid, the archive of HIV/AIDS is a constant invitation to fill in, a performative “to-be-written”, an open challenge to add on, to redress, repair, and reconstruct.
4
The question of the archive has never disappeared from the culture of HIV/AIDS, and indeed, it was there from the very beginning. The leading organisations fighting against the virus and its stigma, at least in metropolitan areas of the West, often made archiving (from interview transcripts to activists’ notes, from letters to event details, from a meeting to a petition, from an article to a photograph or an object) an explicit aim.11 Artists followed suit in their work on AIDS, employing the archive as a form, a method, and a repository of information. Roger Halas has influentially documented how “from the time of their original production and exhibition, queer AIDS media already articulated the political and psychic exigency of the present moment through a complex engagement with archives that range from the personal and the local to the popular and the official”.12 One cannot forget here that some of the major memorial/agonistic interventions from AIDS activism took the form of archival art performances, the AIDS memorial quilts being a case in point (starting from the first, huge quilt displayed in October 1987 in Washington).



AIDS Memorial Quilt, 2022. Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Courtesy of AIDS Memorial.
Of course, this archival having-been-ness should be thought of in both its radicality and precarity. There is a lot that has been lost, there are many personal collections that lie lost or disavowed, there is too much that has been burned, disassembled, or destroyed – especially if you look outside the world of activism, the major cities of the West, or further into minority and intersectionally marginalised and underdocumented groups.
In Greece, for instance, major activist initiatives and organisations that are now defunct have not bequeathed a concrete archive, and it is a struggle to persuade existing ones to develop a more specific archival policy. Moreover, doing this now often unveils the intersectional challenges that such an initiative poses and, even more crucially, points to huge gaps even in our efforts to reconstruct an archive of the past. At the level of safeguarding personal collections, the situation is often worse. My colleague Giorgos Sampatakakis and I will never forget the moment we were shown a unique set of papers, memorabilia, photographs, and diaries by a famous Greek queer poet who succumbed to complications of HIV/AIDS in 1991, even though the cause of his death has never been openly acknowledged. The material was mind-blowing precisely because we have not seen any similar collections in Greek from that period. It included, among other things, the poet’s hospital diaries from the last year of his life, as well as letters exchanged through an international S&M network during the 1980s, mixing technologies of desire and submission with information (and often misinformation) about the disease.
This collection of precious and diverse material was, though, also partly destroyed, cut up, messed with. The collector who was presenting it to us went into a long explanation of how it was thrown on the streets by (or stolen from the house of) the poet’s family, who “did not want to have anything to do with it” and had wanted this material destroyed anyway. After “salvaging them”, he explained, he would now like to sell these papers and objects for a very hefty sum. He wanted us to confirm the importance of this archive in order to marketise the under-representedness of what was represented there. We felt so uneasy, so ethically challenged by this negotiation, that we decided to describe what we had just seen as a ghost-archive, one that will perhaps never see the light of day (again), one that has to be archived as existing and lost at the same time.
To be sure, the uncertainty regarding the state of AIDS-related archives is more general. Even the scrupulous and archivally minded ACT UP-Paris, the French chapter of the organisation created in 1989 by journalist Didier Lestrade, realised in the 2000s that its detailed archive faced a precarious future. Resources for its upkeep were minimal, and by 2014 the situation became critical as the organisation had to leave its legendary base in rue Sedaine, in the 11th Parisian department. They decided first to donate their archives to the Archives Nationales, yet soon realised that there were parts of this collection, especially objects and artworks, which could not be officially donated there. The national archives were not made to contain this type of experience, knowledge, community memory, and their archival self-organisation. The example is important also for what happened next: on the one hand, ACT UP-Paris and a specifically formed initiative, “Les balayeuses archivistiques LGBT” (The LGBT archival sweepers) collected all those props, t-shirts, whistles, badges, posters, banners, which had been scrupulously kept until then as crucial to the history of ACT UP-Paris, but had now been almost lost. They decided to donate this “surplus” and “dissonant” archival material to Mucem (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations) in Marseilles, and that collection became the centre of the Mucem’s major 2021 exhibition, SIDA, L’Épidemie n’est pas finie.13 On the other hand, this became a galvanising issue that gave impetus to the collective Collectif Archives LGBTQI in Paris. The latter has a very clear aim to organise a community-based queer archive that will be alert to such archival dissonance and try to preserve it while giving a community the space to organise forms of knowledge, history, and community memory.
I often think of these stories alongside the case of director, video artist, and superb auto-bio-activist Lionel Soukaz. Soukaz, a very creative member of the Parisian queer community in the 1970s and 80s, started exhaustively documenting his life on VHS in the middle of the AIDS crisis. The result is 2,000 hours of tapes (some of which are recordings with the camera of polaroid photographs, objects, papers, receipts, doctors’ notes, medical exams, etc.), which were eventually donated to the French National Library (the BNF) and have been digitised and documented. They have been used as the material for various edits over a specific theme or person (most famously, the film RV in 1994, after the death of his lover Hervé Couergou) and became the basis of museum installations (among which was an imposing room in Palais de Tokyo in the 2023 exhibition). Talking on the occasion of the latter, Soukaz and his tapes’ curator, Stephane Gérard, were uneasy with the question of whether they should think of all this material “as a work of art (an oeuvre), or as an archive”. Of course, it can be used in new edits in order to create thematically concentrated works, said Soukaz. But at the same time, this whole visual archive is material that shows the impulse to document and to remember. “It’s a visual diary, which first and foremost is a whole: 2,000 or so hours of my life, a materialisation of my memories.” These images are there, co-produced by those (some long gone) who appear in them. You cannot ignore how precious these images are, curator Gérard says. They are “like a promise, one that has been important to keep”.14
ArcHIVing also means this awareness: that our archival impulse today cannot but reconstruct the past’s archival agony; it does not stand for it; it can only stand next to it, reframe it, address its precarity, celebrate its endurance, fight for it, and try to do justice to it.
5
“In 1984, Group Material – an artists’ collective including Félix González-Torres, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger – devised an ‘AIDS timeline’. This included texts, newspaper articles, objects, and works of art describing innumerable aspects of AIDS (political, medical, media, artistic, etc.). It was a huge frieze unfolding both the history of the virus and the struggles surrounding it.” This, as the curators of the exhibition Aux temps du sida: Oeuvres, récits et entrelacs (Strasbourg, 2023–24) explain, is what inspired their own decision to construct a corridor in the opening part of their exhibition. Its walls featured a similar chronology, illustrated and including, where possible, archival material and documents. However, they started their chronology from the present (e.g., catalogues of other AIDS exhibitions of the same year or photographs from the US TV series Pose) and went backwards, guiding you to the first room of the actual exhibition. Crucially, though, this was not an invitation to go back down a memory lane but an invitation to respect diverse forms of archive-making and follow their path. It was an invitation to participate in a thick archival present – even if this gesture entailed what Heather Love has called “feeling backwards”.



Doug Ashforg, AIDS Τimeline, 1989
Installation view of AIDS Timeline at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist.
A recent publication that shares this impulse to feel backwards while respecting archive-making is a short book under the title « Je me doutais qu’il y ait quelque chose »: Archive des années sida (I Had a Suspicion There Was Something: Archive of the Times of AIDS).15 The book reproduces the transcript of the interview that an unnamed middle-aged woman gave on 30 August 1985 to the researchers working with Michel Pollak for a pioneering study on homosexuality and the impact of AIDS. This oral history account now forms part of the archives donated to the Sciences Po in Paris. It was recently taken out of this archival context to be published in small format, the opening page of the original typescript reproduced on its first page. Now, standing alone, the book is speaking about an(other) epidemic, about stigma, homophobia, nosophobia, but also about standing for each other, being brave, uttering what was at the same time being silenced in the public arena. “I did not want to put it back into the box”, says historian Philippe Artières, who is presenting this text today.
ArcHIVing is often unarchiving, taking out of boxes, letting the words speak again, inciting us to do the work of deep contextualisation, but also speaking out of context, or, rather, radicalising context. ArcHIVing is separating older documents, rereading and repurposing what is already an archive woven through with silences but also words, with images but also emotions, with data but also the thickness of lives lived and lives lost, with the speakable tied together with the unspeakable, with the lost tied together with the found. As I reread this short book, the archival fragment still takes on additional meaning; it tells me about a mother and a son, about stigma and phobia, but also about the willingness to speak and to speak up and the need to document, about a whole precarious collection of oral histories and its position in relation to me now; now this mother’s story becomes allegory; now her voice recalls her force; now the past becomes archival present.
This meaningful extraction is what Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr have in mind in their brilliant recent book We Are Having This Conversation Now,16 which is all made up of archival fragments, extracts revisited, and the discussions that can happen around them, through them, with their challenge in mind now. Juhasz and Kerr speak as activists, researchers, and archival artists. In short chapters, they use chronologies, ephemera, and documents or extracts of documents (such as the gap at the beginning of an archived VHS tape) as an invitation to “have a conversation” and to take a position. They also see this as a call to rethink what has not been represented in the known documents from the HIV/AIDS epidemic, whose intersecting exclusions are still (not) visible in the frame and whose voices had not been recorded at the same time as a recording had been happening. As I read, I am doing the same with their book: I find their “add-ins” to all the documents they represent too metropolitan, too American, and too “northern” compared to my own perspective. I often realise that the experience I have looking at these pieces of evidence is already challenged by my own entry (geographical, contextual, historical, tangential, and agential) into this story.
Yet, the point, I suppose, is exactly that. We tend to think of archivality as falling, roughly speaking, under three categories of practice: that of the archive as a more stable collection (and institutional arrangement) of documents; that of the repertoire as a knowledge of performance events that store and transmit knowledge;17 and that of ephemera “as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumour”.18 But ArcHIVing does not stand firmly within one of these; it is neither the production of a final body of data within an institutional archive, nor a collection of mnemonic repertoires, nor an assemblage of ephemera. ArcHIVing could, instead, be seen as a pedagogy on the porosity of the borders between these practices, a way to supersede them, to articulate archival questions on repertoires, to treat ephemera as parts of repertoried performances and map the networks between them, to demand space for ephemeral archives to emerge, and at the same time to combat against ephemerality, transitoriness, and erasure.
“Exposing is living intensely a collective experience”, write the organisers of one of the exhibitions that inspired this piece.19 One of the reasons I have found museums and museum exhibitions to be an unexpectedly rich platform for arcHIVing is also because they make us aware of how much more there is to say and how much more intersectional thinking, research, and participation still need to be invited within this very history, our very history. A phrase by Élisabeth Lebovici that I have seen repeated a lot in these contexts recently is that “in the times of AIDS, we all live and die in AIDS, no matter whether we die of AIDS or not” [aux temps du sida, nous vivons et mourons tous-tes en sida, peu importe que nous mourions ou non du sida]. Which is, of course, polemical, possibly problematic, contextually dependent, and controversial in itself. Yet it is also so influential precisely because it reminds us of how we are entangled in this complex history, how we are constantly repositioned by its thick legacy, interpellated in unexpected ways, how we are addressed by it, we are educated by it, and we are changed in it. This is what HIV has done to us – this is how we can weave, arcHIVing, around us a certain memory, a political memorial and practice, a palimpsest of losses and retrievals, a thick understanding and undertaking.
Information on this event: https://palaisdetokyo.com/evenement/les-pointes-perchees-une-histoire-commune/, accessed November 2024.
Mary Patten, “Pictures from an Epidemic”, in: Staci Boris (ed.), Art AIDS America Chicago, Chicago: Lucia Marquand, 2018, pp. 74–86.
Ibid, p. 80.
Élisabeth Lebovici, Ce que le sida m’a fait: art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle, Zurich/Paris: JRP/Ringier, 2017.
See Athena Athanasiou, Grigoris Gougousis, and Dimitris Papanikolaou (eds), Queer Politics / Public Memory: 30 Texts for Zak, Athens: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2021.
Patten, op. cit., p. 83.
Dimitris Papanikolaou and Giorgos Sampatakakis, “Censorship as Cultural History: HIV/AIDS in Greece (1982-2000)”, November 2020: Archeiotaxio 22, p. 163-182.
This is what Giorgos Sampatakakis has recently done for Greek cinema and AIDS; instead of accepting that there is no major Greek film on the topic, he provided an alternative reading of mainstream films, seen through his own experience, memories, and ephemera. Sampatakakis, “HIV/AIDS: The Lost Representation”, in: Afroditi Nikolaidou and Dimitris Papanikolaou (eds), Motherland I See You: The 20th Century of Greek Cinema, Athens: Nefeli, 2021, pp. 255–260.
Robb Hernández, Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde, New York: NYU Press, 2019, p. 27.
See Matt Cook, “’Archives of Feeling’: The AIDS Crisis in Britain 1987”, History Workshop Journal, 83, 1, 2017: 51–78.
Roger Halas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2009, p. 27.
See Florent Molle and Caroline Chenu, “ACT UP-Paris dans les collections du Mucem:, La Revue des Musées de France/ Revue du Louvre, 4, 2020, p. 80-92.
“Entretien avec Lionel Soukaz et Stéphane Gérard”, in: Élisabeth Lebovici (ed.), Exposé·es, d’après « Ce que le sida m’a fait » d’Élisabeth Lebovici, Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2023, p. 135.
Je me doutais qu’il y avait quelque chose… Archive des années sida, presented par Philippe Artiéres, Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2023.
Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: NYU Press, 2009, p. 65.
VIH/sida, l’Épidemie n’est pas finie!, Anamosa/Mucem, Marseille, 2021, p. 15.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dimitris Papanikolaou is professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (Legenda and Routledge, 2007), “Those people made like me”: C. P. Cavafy and the poetics of sexuality (Patakis, 2014, in Greek), There is something about the family: Nation, desire, and kinship in a time of crisis (Patakis, 2018, in Greek), and Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).