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Visual AIDS is thrilled to announce that Eugenio Echeverría will be our fifth annual Curatorial Resident, co-sponsored with Residency Unlimited. Eugenio will spend April 2017 conducting research in Visual AIDS' archives with access to slides, digital images, publications and other resources, as well as activating our community through dialogues, studio visits and a public program.
Eugenio lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico, where he is the founder and director of Border Cultural Center. Since 2006, Border Cultural Center has coordinated over 100 interdisciplinary exhibitions and site-specific interventions. Highlights include QUEER UP! (DYKES, FAGS, WEIRDOS & YOU), a 12 month program of residencies, seminars, exhibitions and more considering LGBTQI identities, in collaboration with Laos Salazar; MULTIVERSO TRANS, a four day conference on trans identities conceptualized in collaboration with artists and trans activists focusing on violence, sex work, access to healthcare, legislative reforms and the autonomy of trans individuals, including LO QUE SE VE NO SE PREGUNTA, the first Mexican exhibition on trans identities, curated with Tania Pomar, Susana Vargas and Laos Salaza; and the upcoming project HACKING THE CITY, fostering discussion on civil disobedience in urban contexts, directed by Edith Medina. Here, Eugenio outlines his upcoming residency and its broader stakes:
My proposal for the Visual AIDS / Residency Unlimited Curatorial Residency is a research project that will allow me to design the contents and narratives for a museological timeline. The proposed research establishes a comparative chronological analysis between 1970s liberation politics, HIV/AIDS activisms, art and literature of the late 80's and early 90's, and the production of present knowledge through the 2000s amidst the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. During the month-long residency, I will meet with AIDS activists and artists living with HIV to create a critical and historical review of the past half century that will be represented in timeline form, integrating text, artwork, photography and documents.
Seeking a critical reading on the evolution of discourses around the culture of HIV/AIDS, I will focus on three nodes:
- Identity as it relates to links within community and affective networks
- Distribution of violence from public policies, science and media
- Dissident narratives on HIV/AIDS
Extending from my curatorial residency, in early 2018 I aim to present a historical and sociological exhibition in Mexico City.
In my role as director of Border Cultural Center, I often coordinate and deploy projects and activities in spaces with potential for community connection and symbolic weight. It is in dissent we, the people who are dissatisfied with the ideological regime, seek to reposition ourselves, often inside and outside the ideology at the same time, experimenting with acquired knowledge and projecting new ways of combining data and ideas. This exercise is always uncertain, contradictory, and sometimes unsuccessful, but in the best of cases we come to break meanings, opening up micro-spaces of personal, group and collective liberation. It is in how we share experience and knowledge that we can transform ourselves and redefine our emotional and social role. By socializing these processes, or by joining dissident discourses already developed, valuable and potentially revealing spaces open up.
I am looking forward to April 2017 in New York City!
