LOCATION
GLBT Historical Society Museum, 4127 18th St., San Francisco, CA 94114
ADMISSION
$10 admission, free for members.
The GLBT Historical Society is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2024 by presenting Red Reminds Me…, a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today.
Red Reminds Me… will feature newly commissioned videos by Gian Cruz (Philippines), Milko Delgado (Panama), Imani Harrington (USA), David Oscar Harvey (USA), Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar (Argentina/Colombia), Nixie (Belgium), Vasilios Papapitsios (USA).
Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has been long associated with the color red and its connotations—blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. Red Reminds Me… invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, from eroticism and intimacy, mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting. The commissioned artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today.
The title is drawn from the words of Stacy Jennings, an activist, poet, and long-term survivor with HIV, who writes: “Red reminds me, red reminds me, red reminds me…to be free.”* Linking “red” to freedom, Jennings flips the usual connotations of the color and offers a new way of thinking about the complexity of living with HIV. Just as a prism bends and refracts light, Red Reminds Me…, expands the emotional spectrum of living with HIV. It shows us that while grief, tragedy, and anger define parts of the epidemic, the full picture contains deeper, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings.
Following the screening will be a panel discussion and talkback in response to the films, featuring local San Francisco professionals, activists, and artists working around HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and community resource building.
Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.
*Jennings recites this poem in the video Here We Are: Voices of Black Women Who Live with HIV, created by Davina “Dee” Conner and Karin Hayes for Day With(out) Art 2022: Being and Belonging.
Watch the program trailer below:
Video SynopseS
Gian Cruz, Dear Kwong Chi
In Dear Kwong Chi, Cruz creates a video letter to the late artist Tseng Kwong Chi, drawing from the experience of living with HIV in diaspora. Across continents and decades, Kwong Chi’s legacy acts as an anchor for Cruz amongst limited representations of Asian narratives in AIDS histories.
Milko Delgado, El Club del SIDA
Taking its title from a sensational telenovela episode, El Club del SIDA cycles through a lifetime of heavily stigmatizing images about HIV and AIDS. Delgado plays with multiple aesthetics—documentary, horror, comedy—to explore the various relationships he has had with AIDS over the course of his life.
Imani Harrington, Realms Remix
Through a collage of poetry and archival images, Realms Remix traces memories and sensations of an AIDS past that continue to haunt the present.
David Oscar Harvey, Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck
Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck tackles the disorienting experience of existing with a manageable condition that our present culture insists on representing in terms of its bleak past. Interested in figuring HIV differently, the film presents a series of visual puns merging the iconography of HIV and AIDS with popular symbols of luck.
Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar, El VIH se enamoró de mi (HIV Fell in Love With Me)
HIV Fell in Love With Me tells the story of a woman with HIV embracing her sexuality and reconnecting with her pleasure. Filmed with an erotic aesthetic, the video reflects a pursuit towards sexual justice and autonomy for women living with HIV.
Nixie, it’s giving
Through home videos, archival footage and textile landscapes, it’s giving explores various forms of family across time. The artist's domestic life is paired with archival video of queer and trans chosen families mirroring small acts of joy, resistance, and sustenance. What does it mean for an HIV+ person, who carries the history and present of the AIDS-crisis in their DNA, to foster new life?
Vasilios Papapitsios, LUCID NIGHTMARE
Papapitsios describes LUCID NIGHTMARE as a “meditation on how we can(not) heal in the environments that make us sick, from the perspective of an infected neurodivergent faggot.” Combining auto-fiction with magical realism, Papapitsios humorously reimagines narratives around mental health and chronic illness.
SPEAKERS
Vince Crisostomo (he/him) is a gay Chamorro (Pacific Islander) who has been living with HIV for more than three decades. He believes in the power of community and is passionate about bringing healthcare and social justice equity to people of every sexual identity, HIV status, gender, race and age. Over his 30-year career, Mr Crisostomo has worked in the US and Asia Pacific region as an HIV educator and executive director for community-based organizations, including the Coral Life Foundation and 7 Sisters. From 2009 to 2010, he served as the UNAIDS Asia Pacific NGO delegate, and more recently, as Co-Chair of the HIV and Aging Work Group of San Francisco’s Long-Term Care Coordinating Council. In 2019, Mr Crisostomo was honored as a Community Grand Marshal for the SF Pride Parade and Celebration. He is currently the Director of Aging Services at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. In 2024, the National AIDS Memorial Grove recognized Vince with the Thom Weyand Unsung Hero Award in recognition of his decades of advocacy.
Lance Dwyer(he/him) has worked in HIV prevention, care, and general direct services for 16 years. Lance first started as a peer leader for a HIV prevention youth group known as AQU25A at San Francisco Community Health Center (known then as A&PI Wellness Center). After leaving the organization in 2010 to earn his master's in social welfare from UC Berkeley, he returned in 2016 as a full-time therapist. His role within the agency has evolved over the past 8 years to be clinical supervisor, workforce transformation manager, associate director of mental health services, and now in his current role as associate director of organizational learning. Lance continues to hold a small case load of therapy clients as well as provide support for the Joy Luck Club, SFCHC’s cherished 34-year old institution serving A&PI’s living with HIV.
Derrick Mapp (he/him) has been with the Shanti L.I.F.E. Program in San Francisco since 2000, initially as a program volunteer, as an emotional health support counselor and group facilitator, and since 2018 as senior services care navigator. From the late 1980s, he has been a direct service provider in the mental health/substance use and harm reduction/recovery communities, with short involvement in ACT-UP Philadelphia and ACT-UP New York subcommittees. After seroconverting in the 1990s, he began his community advocacy activities in HIV treatment and prevention research networks.
Location
GLBT Historical Society Museum, 4127 18th St., San Francisco, CA 94114
Admission
Admission is free for members and $10 for non-members. This event will likely sell out, so guests are encouraged to reserve their tickets early. Tickets are available here.
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