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by Marika Cifor

Status = Undetectable: Curating for the Present and Future of AIDS

Introduction
“We’ve reached a crossroads in HIV treatment. HIV positive and HIV negative are no longer the only possibilities when discussing serostatus. The word undetectable has emerged in this conversation.”[1] These words begin the Undetectable Flash Collective’s 2014 intervention on undetectability. Undetectability names the status of a person living with HIV who through medical treatment is able to lower the load of the HIV virus in their body to levels that are insignificant statistically. As the Collective proclaims, undetectability is more than a simple description of successful HIV treatment. It names an identity that troubles the established binary of HIV-positivity or negativity. Undetectability is a significant focal point in HIV/AIDS discourses, producing and reproducing concerns about visibility, measurement, temporality, presence and absence, contagion, and bodies and embodiment.[2] Undetectability surfaces meaningful concerns for curators of contemporary AIDS exhibitions. This article uses “undetectability” as the point of departure to consider the extent to which medicine and public health, humanistic, and artistic and activist engagements with HIV/AIDS affect the question of historicizing and memorializing an ongoing epidemic through curatorial work with and inspired by AIDS archives. I argue that curating with and about AIDS’ archival past requires a critical engagement with AIDS’ present. The lens of undetectability offers curators a crucial means to engage with urgent contemporary concerns of representation and temporality in ever-more-common shows focusing on the presentation of 1980s and 1990s AIDS activism and cultural production.

In 1987, Douglas Crimp wrote, “AIDS does not exist separately from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices.”[3] Undetectability is now such a practice. For those with access to medical intervention who are able to attain and then to maintain undetectability, the virus’ representation is transformed. Already invisible to the naked eye, the virus is made doubly so in its failure to register in conventional testing. Moreover, it is rendered non-contagious. HIV-positive persons with an undetectable status may be subsequently reframed as “respectable” and “responsible,” while their bodies hold the promise of halting the virus. As Jan Huebenthal writes, undetectability “connotes privilege and fitness for citizenship.”[4] With undetectability, HIV is conceptualized in scientific, medical, and cultural discourses as less infectious and catastrophic than it once was. However, HIV stigma and discrimination continue to pervade when HIV is bothered to be represented at all in a U.S. context. It is important to note that race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic disparities curtail access to undetectability.

AIDS, as Susan Sontag noted,[5] has always been a temporal condition. The virus moves and circulates with a particular rhythm. It takes for many a full decade from infection to first development of symptoms.[6] Undetectability also names a temporal relation. It marks the advent of the “manageable chronicity of AIDS.”[7] Undetectable is the current pinnacle of the biomedical intervention. Before the development of an effective antiretroviral drug cocktail in 1995, a long and relatively healthy life was a near impossibility for those living with HIV and AIDS. As Marita Sturken articulates, the AIDS epidemic from its first medical recognition in 1981 through the early 1990s had a particular temporal meaning. Time was accelerated and the far-reaching devastation called for an “immediate, in the moment, on the street” response.[8] Biomedical developments have brought a measured sense of security and safety, shifting the temporality of HIV/AIDS again. Undetectability shapes current practices, policies, and the politics of with HIV as well as engagements with the AIDS’ past. It therefore holds direct implications for the ongoing epidemic’s future. Undetectability powerfully disrupts linear notions of temporal progression from past through present into future.

From the 1980s onward, activists and archivists have created, collected, preserved, and made accessible HIV/AIDS knowledge. Archival materials created during the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S. are increasingly being employed by curators within a range of exhibition contexts to develop shows about AIDS and its cultural production. Such shows featuring the archive prominently often focus exclusively on the past of AIDS. That framing threatens to dangerously historicize the epidemic. This article analyzes the New York Public Library’s exhibition and programming for Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism, a major exhibition of archival materials documenting 1980s and 1990s AIDS activism. It is through the commissioning of new work inspired by and utilizing these records, the intervention of the Undetectable Collective, that the show reached successfully into pressing present concerns of the AIDS epidemic. I begin by framing undetectability as biomedical and cultural status. Next, I turn attention the Undetectable Collective’s work. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how the logic of undetectability can inform curatorial engagements of archives with implicated communities as well as the cultural memory of the AIDS epidemic, and hence the very meaning of the epidemic itself.

 

This page and next: Undetectable Collective, What is Undetectable?, 2014, Image of lenticular print © Undetectable Collective.


This page and next: Undetectable Collective, What is Undetectable?, 2014, Image of lenticular print © Undetectable Collective.

Undetectable Collective, What is Undetectable?, 2014, Image of lenticular print © Undetectable Collective.

 

Undetectable as a Biomedical and Cultural Status
In 1985, the first test kit to screen for antibodies to HIV was developed and approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration.[9] This test emerged one year after HIV was officially identified as the etiologic agent of AIDS, and five years after the first mention of cases attributed to the virus.[10] The test played a key role inaugurating the fraught categories of “HIV positive” and “HIV negative,” a profound binary across the realms of science, medicine, sexuality, politics, and culture.[11] A decade later, in 1996, the biotechnical development of highly active antiretroviral therapy offered for the first time an effective treatment for HIV/AIDS.[12] Eventually, those treatments would enable the suppression of the virus to undetectable levels.

In 2008, the first major study by Members of a Swiss Federal Commission for HIV/AIDS found that persons living with HIV on ARV treatments could not transmit the virus through sexual contact if they had viral loads that had reached and stabilized at undetectable levels for a period of six months.[13] Numerous studies confirmed these findings; however, it was not until 2017 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out in support of the same conclusion.[14] Over the course of the last decade, health-governing bodies and scientific communities have been cautiously supportive of undetectability’s potential. Patient advocacy organizations have emphasized undetectability’s promise for enhancing the “quality of life” and social integration of people living with HIV/AIDS.[15] It is their, as yet unrealized, hope that undetectability will fundamentally change antiquated understandings of HIV as dangerous and deadly, thus ending persistent fear, discrimination, and stigmatization.

The “treatment as prevention” model that dominates current public health approaches to HIV/AIDS both promotes the desirability of undetectability and works to materially enable it. This model is central to various strategies to end the epidemic by health-governing institutions including governments, non-governmental organizations, advocates, major donors, and the pharmaceutical industry. Treatment as prevention relies, first, on dramatically increasing the percentage of persons living with HIV/AIDS who are tested and are therefore aware of their serostatus. Second, it focuses on increasing the number of those persons who are on ARVs and under medical supervision and continued surveillance. In public health and medical definitions, “the end of AIDS” has come to mean the significant decrease in rates of HIV transmission, rather than a cure for those already living with the virus.

As curator and academic Nathan Lee writes of HIV, “Drugs have curtailed its lethality but not its ubiquity, and the long-term effects of combination therapies, which continue to evolve, are an open question. We know that AIDS is not what it was, but we’re not at all sure what it has become.”[16] While most literature on undetectability emerges from medicine and public health, the cultural and political implications of undetectability have begun to garner some scholarly attention. Much of this work charts the meanings of undetectability for queer lives, activism, and politics.[17] For example, Kane Race examines how the treatment and monitoring of HIV has impacted conceptions of gay men’s bodies, selves, and sexual identities.[18] More recently, Jan Huebenthal describes how undetectability discourses shape homonormative LGBT identity politics.[19] Drawing together queer studies, public health and art, Katrin Köppert and Todd Sekuler examine an exhibition of HIV/AIDS posters to address the extent to which undetectability affects the memorializing of an ongoing disease.[20]

Curatorial work has been an important space for creating and engaging with cultural and political meanings of undetectability. From the earliest availability of treatment protocols, artists have represented medications and their roles in the complexities of living with HIV.[21] In 2012, Lee with assistant curator Rachel Cook curated an exhibition titled Undetectable for Visual AIDS, a community-based arts organization committed to using visual art to fight AIDS. The show ran that May and June at La MaMa La Galleria in New York City. Through the exhibition of artworks and its catalog,[22] the curators and participating artists tackled the complex realities of undetectability. In his opening essay, Lee describes undetectability as “signifying a presence that is absent, predicated on suppression and surveillance, the undetectable occupies an indeterminate space and produces new modes of connectivity, at once increasing the capacity of a body and subjecting it to a relentless regime of control.”[23] His words highlight bodily autonomy and the political economy concerns. In the piece used to promote the show, a 2012 proposal rendering for Nested Voids: The Conspiracy, artist Bradley Pitts combines scientific and architectural approaches. Pitts depicts a brightly illuminated vitrine in an expansively gray room. Behind the vitrine stands an anonymized translucent human figure. The vitrine itself is the center point. Its caption notes that it contains the artist’s “email correspondence and photos” which document “the clandestine installation of an imperceptible artwork with in ‘Voids’, a retrospective of empty exhibitions.” The artist creates and exhibits his own archive of the undetectable. In his essay, Andy Campbell muses on undetectability as an identity, “How to best convey the feelings of confidence, defeat, survivorship, guilt, power, love, boredom, dailyness, relief, haunting, imbrication, and trauma that no doubt such person’s experience?”[24] Both Campbell’s essay and the exhibition itself are premised on “the specificity of ‘undetectable’ as an embodied identity that warrants consideration as a part of, and apart from, seronegative and seropositive statuses.”[25] Campbell reports that the artworks featured in the exhibition are often appropriately “oblique” in their “reference to such a status, which may, in fact, describe the particular geometry of being undetectable.”[26]

“The Collective is Indeed a Flash”
The Undetectable Collective’s art intervention contended explicitly with the biomedical, cultural, and political implications of undetectability. The Collective was formed through a collaboration between the New York Public Library (NYPL) and activist, agit prop creator and writer Avram Finkelstein. It was supported by the Library as an epilogue to their exhibition and programming series, Why We Fight. The Collective’s work was directly inspired by and in conversation with the exhibition, and their work was exhibited and disseminated in public library and museum spaces. Their work complicating an exhibition makes important interventions around the representation and temporality of AIDS activism of the past in the present and with a critical eye for the future. The lens of undetectability employed exposes urgent concerns for curators in conceptualizing, representing, and responding to the contemporary AIDS epidemic.

Why We Fight showcased posters, pamphlets, artifacts, and video footage documenting AIDS activism during the 1980s and early 1990s. Most of these materials were drawn from the NYPL’s collections of organizations and individuals pivotal in their responses to the early AIDS epidemic. Why We Fight ran from October 2013 to April 2014 in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery in the Library’s Stephen A. Schwartzman Building in Midtown Manhattan, a small, but prime location. Jason Baumann, Coordinator of Humanities and LGBT Collections, and Laura Karas, the archivist who had done much of the archival processing of these collections, co-curated the show. It was Baumann who took the lead on curatorial strategy. Rejecting a linear chronological arrangement, he describes the exhibition narrative as resembling a “constellation.”[27] The vitrines were organized topically around subjects including: “Changing Perceptions of People Living with HIV,” “Safer Sex and Needle Exchanges,” “Public Mourning,” “Healthcare Activism,” and “HIV Today.” The show was accompanied by a large public programming series for teens and adults in locations across the City. Together, the exhibition and programming were intended to inform and to inspire visitors, both those who had participated in AIDS activism and a general public new to the subject.

Most of the exhibition’s wall texts written by Baumann focused primarily, as did the material on display, on the 1980s and 1990s. The notable temporal exception was the exhibition’s final wall text, “HIV Today.” This text begins “The AIDS epidemic is far from over.” It then offered readers a set of current statistics about the epidemic in the U.S. and globally. This text concludes by referencing UNAIDS focus on prevention and treatment, including plans to attain universal treatment access by 2015. In its focus on contemporary realities and responses to the ongoing epidemic, the text makes reference to undetectability and to the “treatment as prevention” model implicitly. It is for the frame of “remembering,” included in the exhibition’s title, and for its temporal focus on showcasing archival materials and artworks from the 1980s and early 1990s that the show faced criticism from some in AIDS activist communities. The perceived historicization of AIDS activism is what ACT UP/NY responded to in their die-in action within and outside of the exhibition on its opening night. Art critic and curator Emily Colucci, wrote in her review, “I felt that I was watching a long-ago historical event, rather than a demonstration about a crisis that continues to rage on.”[28] Colucci called into question why the coverage of AIDS activism in the show ended as the successful cocktail became available in 1996. In our interview Baumann acknowledged the validity of such criticism. However, he frames the temporal limitations of the exhibition as reflective of the very limits of the archives at his disposal. The show “didn’t tell the story of the activism that’s happening today,” he said, because “I don’t have that archive…what’s happening today, that’s not history yet.[29]

Finkelstein shared, “We are being told people don’t care about AIDS, but I disagree after a decade of speaking around the world and having people ask the same question: What can we do now?”[30] He notes, “I have come to realize that the answer to the question of how to re-engage a public with the issues surrounding HIV/AIDS in the present doesn’t lie in looking at the canon of cultural production from those early days […] It’s in looking through these works, to the resistance strategies that brought them into being in the first place. That’s how we might imagine alternative models for the activation of our social spaces.”[31]

Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. In his own practice and in his mentorship of younger generations of activist artists, he continues to utilize visual tools to enact social change. Baumann invited Finkelstein to write a series of blog posts to accompany Why We Fight. Finkelstein readily signed on, but he offered up his own counter-proposal to organize what he terms a “flash collective.” Flash collectives, an idea created by Finkelstein based on his years of collective work, are collective interventions aimed at activating social spaces. Each collective brings together collaborators for a brief duration to create political messages that employ “skills drawn on in collective decision-making with a surgical and fast-paced format intended to cut directly to the point of the work, content.”[32] The inclusion of a flash collective within the exhibition programming offers important evidence of a curatorial strategy that emphasized bringing archival materials documenting AIDS activism historically into conversation with the present realities of the crisis. The Collective’s work also uncovers the contemporary utility of activating earlier activists’ graphics and strategies. By turning to a pressing contemporary issue, undetectability, the Collective also showcased an ongoing need for AIDS cultural activism now.

The NYPL provided financial backing, and Finkelstein and Visual AIDS provided curatorial assistance for the Collective. Together they issued a call for participation. Finkelstein’s work with the Collective animated the archive in many ways, not least of which by establishing himself as a resource, a mentor, and a source of information for other activists and artists. As Finkelstein has put it, “the pedagogy” of the flash collective requires “having interdisciplinary participants in order to have diversity in skills and perspectives.”[33] Collective members included: Avram Finkelstein, Alex Fialho, Alina Oswald, Brendan Mahoney, Conrad Ventur, Filip Condeescu, Gerald Mocarsky, hucklefaery, Jano Cortijo, Jorge Sanchez, Kenneth Pietrobono, Lanai Daniels, Mark Blane, Nick Kleist, Pablo Herrera, and Spear Minteh. The members of the Collective are artists, writers, activists, curators, journalists, policy wonks, and Radical Faeries.

Finkelstein and the Library stipulated only two guidelines for the project: first, that it had to address HIV/AIDS, and second, that it had to be engaged with contemporary issues. At their first meeting, Finkelstein called upon members to critically consider how art could be an effective space for social intervention.[34] As Kleist described their work, “The collective is indeed a flash, it is a sudden rush of energy that occurs when all points touch.”[35] The difficulty of doing collective work is part of the aim of flash collectives. It is by doing work together, through the sharing of skills and ideas in the same manner that multiple generations of AIDS activists have, that participants gain “the tools and the experience of what it is like to be in a community, however curated it might be, however momentary.”[36] The Collective’s work took place over an approximately two-month period. 

Together, members began the process of developing their project by working on a series of mapping exercises in order to uncover what HIV/AIDS is and what it does today. The major themes they identified in this early work included: the emergent and ongoing status of HIV/AIDS crisis; the impacts of pharmaceutical development, intervention, and access; the pervasive fear, stigma, and discrimination associated with HIV/AIDS; the complexity of HIV disclosure interpersonally; the racialized, classed, and gendered space of HIV criminalization; and the significance of serodivides within impacted communities.[37] It was here that the term, undetectable, emerged as their focal point. Choosing undetectability meant that the Collective had to contend with its definitions, implications, access, and meanings from diverse socio-political perspectives.

In their second meeting, the Collective turned their attention to producing their own intervention. They had to come to a consensus as to how to visually communicate the complex, interconnected concerns that fall under the vast rubric of undetectability. They also had to consider how to engage a diverse and far-reaching public. As a strategy, the group created a Tumblr to work through ideas.[38] It includes a series of animated GIFs that illuminate their process. A post by artist and Collective member hucklefaery includes a number of GIFs they created at this stage when directed to make something that would “inspire each other.”[39] One GIF begins with a black screen in which an emptied plus sign bounces around. Turning white, the letters “HIV” appear above the plus sign. The words are quickly placed behind a series of bars. Additional text appears, reading “HIV + is not a crime, undetectable, learn the facts on the fear.” Along with the graphic, hucklefaery posted that they intended this work to create needed dialogue within the group around the multifaceted implications of HIV criminalization. Contesting the dominant dialogue on criminalization that focuses exclusively on actual or possible HIV transmission, they ask “how might ‘criminal’ issues be impacted by “Undetectable” individuals [based on emerging data]; and how might HIV Stigma be deepened by these same shifts in thinking?” These early GIFs showcase the range of conversation within the group and the struggle they went through to concisely and powerfully develop a political message about undetectability.

The Collective’s primary intervention consisted of four posters in lightboxes, and 2,500 outreach postcards were circulated and disseminated to the public at four library branches across New York City. In these library spaces, thousands of people move through every month who are likely not there for the art and who are not necessarily thinking about HIV/AIDS. The displays and postcards include the Collective’s statement, “What is Undetectable?.” It reads in dark gray capital letters:

We’re at a crossroads in HIV treatment. HIV positive & HIV negative are no longer the only possibilities when discussing serostatus. The word undetectable has emerged in this conversation. Undetectable originated as a medical term for an “acceptably” low presence of HIV in the bloodstream dependent on strict compliance with “successful” antiretroviral treatments. Maintaining undetectable viral levels significantly reduces HIV transmission, but it is not a cure for AIDS & does not remove stigma. Not everyone has access to information or treatments, so the emphasis on achieving undetectability reinforces racial & socioeconomic divides. Because there is more money in lifelong treatment, profit-driven drug companies have no financial incentive to find a cure. Undetectability saves lives. But whose lives? & Who profits? Where’s the cure?[40]

Here, the group’s early conversations and creative work around medicine, transmission, economics, and gendered, classed, and racialized experiences of undetectability were activated. The 36-by-36-inch lenticular posters in each of the four lightboxes featured the text over a familiar choice of a blood-red background, provocatively deploying the color associated with AIDS. Lenticular printing on the posters and cards allowed for the print to flash “undetectable” in a plus sign in shades of gray over its surface. As a “visualization of the medical term,” the sign reflected that HIV status itself is in flux through its very appearance and disappearance.[41] None of the selected libraries have formal galleries; the lightboxes and cards were conceptualized as installations that interacted within the central space of that library. The lightboxes in Washington Heights and the Bronx were in Spanish; those on Staten Island and the Village were in English. The outreach cards distributed and dispersed into the hands of patrons at all sites were in printed in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian, the primary languages of NYPL users.

Visual AIDS was so taken with the Collective’s work that they decided to use it as a basis for a 2015 public program at the New Museum’s IdeasCity Festival. The festival that year was themed “The Invisible City.”[42] Together, Finkelstein and Collective member and Visual AIDS Programs Director Fialho developed the concept of using balloons, on which the Collective’s question, “What is Undetectable?,” was printed on one side. At the event, members along with Visual AIDS staff and volunteers posed this question to people passing. Over 300 people responded. Responses from the general public on HIV ranged from, “Can undetectable folks transmit HIV?” to “Personal goals.” They also provided a range of definitions that were not necessarily HIV/AIDS-related. For example, “I saw five flying saucers when I was 6,” and “Inner feelings (and) suppressed emotions.” Visual AIDS and Collective members then had one-on-one conversations about undetectability and the current epidemic. As Fialho described, they were able here to employ their dialogic process with the public, making the Collective’s work “even more outward facing.”[43]

Curating Undetectability
Undetectability has fundamentally changed the contemporary landscape and meaning of HIV/AIDS. The Undetectable Collective demonstrates undetectability’s utility as a model for emphasizing the contemporary when curating work grounded in 1980s and 1990s AIDS archives. There is great potential in commissioning new creative and activist works in the context of such archivally focused exhibitions. Undetectability as a curatorial strategy can shift archives, museums, galleries, and online curatorial spaces in the direction of intervening in the present epidemic and towards more ethically and productively serving HIV/AIDS communities.

The work of archives is to document, arrange, preserve, and make accessible the past in contextualized ways. The lens of undetectability allows for curators working with AIDS archival records to animate the power of non-linear temporalities. Undetectability draws vital attention to the continued potential and ongoing presence of the past in the present. Drawing critically on that archival past shapes our ability to better live in the present and imagine a different and more just future for all impacted by the AIDS crisis. A crucial part of the archives’ efforts is community and solidarity-building that reaches across the bounds of space and time. Curatorial work, done by archivists or in collaboration with outside curators and arts organizations, is increasingly becoming understood as an instrumental component of archival work. It is by curating with an eye to the present that AIDS archives can work to ensure that the past is deployed to serve its constituencies and to aid them in constructing livable and vibrant futures. New work such as that of the Undetectable Collective can call for the powerful creative use of the archival collections of AIDS’ past in service of addressing HIV/AIDS’ present issues and future realities. The Collective’s adaptation of image-driven strategies at the intersection of art and activism employed so effectively in the 1980s and 1990s to meet the needs of contemporary social, cultural, and political struggles for justice offers a prime example of the far-reaching implications of curating with AIDS archives now. 

With improved, if far from perfect, treatments, the embodied visibility of AIDS has decreased even while infection rates in many communities have not. We are now working in a time characterized by the undetectability of HIV not only in individual bodies, but also in a culture where HIV is often undetectable. HIV is a crisis of visual representation. The frequent invisibility of HIV/AIDS has contributed to the perception of it as a silent killer, unseen but present in the bodies of dangerous others circulating in our midst. The Collective’s work at the intersection of art and activism in urban public space renders HIV/AIDS substantively visible again in New York City, moving towards greater attention to contemporary HIV concerns in American society. These actions serve as a reminder of the urgent, continued political necessity for AIDS activism now. Curators hold the power to use their practices to open multiple potentialities for a different AIDS present and future.


Dr. Marika Cifor is Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She is a feminist scholar working at the intersections of archival studies and digital studies. Her current book project, Viral Cultures: Activist Archives at the End of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, under contract), examines the critical potential of the emotions and memories that are recorded and produced by archives documenting HIV/AIDS activism during the 1980s and 1990s. This project also investigates the activation of these records on contemporary digital platforms by artists, archivists, and activists. She holds a PhD in Information Studies from UCLA and an MA in History and MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all who have contributed to this research including my participants and dissertation committee. She would like to acknowledge in particular Jason Baumann, Alex Fialho, and Avram Finkelstein, participants whose words are included here. Her gratitude is also extended to the audience and fellow panelists for feedback on an earlier version of this paper presented in a session on AIDS activism at a 2017 American Studies Association conference. The Social Science Research Council and UCLA Graduate Division were instrumental in funding this research.


Notes
[1] “What is Undetectable?,” Undetectable Collective (2014), https://whatisundetectable.tumblr.com/.

[2] Nathan Lee, “With the Aim of Making it Snap,” In Undetectable, eds. Nathan Lee and Rachel Cook (New York: Visual AIDS, 2012), 9-12.

[3] Douglas Crimp, “AIDS Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism.” October 43 (1987): 3-16, 3.

[4] Jan Huebenthal, “Un/Detectability in Times of ‘Equality’: HIV, Queer Health, and Homonormativity,” European Journal of American Studies 11, no. 3 (2017): 1-22, 2.

[5] Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

[6] Nathan Lee, “Becoming-Undetectable,” e-flux 44 (2013), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/44/60170/becoming-undetectable/.

[7] Huebenthal, “Un/Detectability in Times of ‘Equality,’” 2.

[8] Marita Sturken, “AIDS Activist Legacies and the Gran Fury of the Past/Present,” emisférica 9, nos. 1-2 (2012), http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/sturken.

[9] “HIV/AIDS Historical Time Line 1981-1990,” United States Food and Drug Administration, August 8, 2014, http://www.fda.gov/ForPatients/Illness/HIVAIDS/History/ucm151074.htm.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Lee, “With the Aim of Making it Snap.”

[12] Liz Hunt, “‘Cocktail’ Opens New Chapter on AIDS,” The Independent, July 12, 1996, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/cocktail-opens-new-chapter-on-aids-1328432.html.

[13] Pietro Vernazza, Bernard Hirschel, Enos Bernasconi, and Markus Flepp, “HIV-positive individuals without additional sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and on effective anti-retroviral therapy are sexually non-infectious,” Bulletin des médecins suisses 89 (2008): 165-169.

[14] “Dear Colleague: September 27, 2017,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/library/dcl/dcl/092717.html.

[15] Katrin Köppert and Todd Sekuler, “Sick Memory: On the Un-detectable in Archiving AIDS,” Drain Magazine 13, no. 2 (2016), http://drainmag.com/sick-memory-on-the-un-detectable-in-archiving-aids/.

[16] Lee, “Becoming-Undetectable.”

[17] Huebenthal, “Un/Detectability in Times of ‘Equality’”; Kane Race, “The Undetectable Crisis: Changing Technologies of Risk,” Sexualities 4, no. 2 (2001): 161-189; David Roman, “Not-About-AIDS,” GLQ 6, no. 1 (2000): 1-28; Lee, “Becoming-Undetectable.”

[18] Race, “The Undetectable Crisis: Changing Technologies of Risk.”

[19] Huebenthal, “Un/Detectability in Times of ‘Equality.’”

[20] Köppert and Sekuler, “Sick Memory: On the Un-detectable in Archiving AIDS.”

[21] Eli Manning, “HAART in Art: Temporal Reflections on Artistic Representations of HIV Medications,” Visual AIDS Web Gallery (September 2014), https://www.visualaids.org/gallery/detail/743.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Andy Campbell, “Sister Undetectable…for Claudette,” in Undetectable, eds. Nathan Lee and Rachel Cook (New York: Visual AIDS, 2012), 13-23, 15.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Jason Baumann, interview with Marika Cifor, New York City, August 25, 2016.

[28] Emily Colucci, “More Demonstrations and Less Memorials In ‘Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism’” Filthy Dreams (October 19, 2013), https://filthydreams.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/more-demonstrations-and-less-memorials-in-why-we-fight-remembering-aids-activism/.

[29] Baumann, interview with Marika Cifor.

[30] Avram Finkelstein, interview with Marika Cifor, Brooklyn, May 19, 2016.

[31] Alex Fialho, “‘The collective is indeed a flash: it is a sudden rush of energy that occurs when all points touch,’” Visual AIDS Blog (May 29, 2015), https://www.visualaids.org/blog/detail/the-collective-is-indeed-a-flash-it-is-a-sudden-rush-of-energy-that-occurs.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Larry Buhl, “Undetectable, Not Invisible: A Flash Collective Workshop Mounts an ‘Art Intervention’ at New York Public Library,” A&U Magazine (December 14, 2014), http://aumag.org/2014/12/18/undetectable-flash-collective/.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Fialho, “‘The collective is indeed a flash: it is a sudden rush of energy that occurs when all points touch.’”

[36] Finkelstein, interview with Marika Cifor.

[37] Buhl, “Undetectable, Not Invisible.”

[38] The strategy of working through a shared Tumblr was something that previous Flash Collectives led by Finkelstein had done, including the inaugural Flash Collective in Montreal.

[39] Undetectable Collective. “What is Undetectable?”

[40] Ibid.

[41] Alex Fialho, interview with Marika Cifor, New York City, May 25, 2016.

[42] Visual AIDS, “What is Undetectable?,” Poz Magazine, June 23, 2015, https://www.poz.com/blog/ideas-city-festival.

[43] Fialho, interview with Marika Cifor.


Go back

Issue 42

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT AIDS COULD FILL A MUSEUM

 

by Theodore (ted) Kerr

by Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad and Louie Ortiz-Fonseca

by Sheldon Raymore

by Michael McFadden

by Rahne Alexander

by Adam Barbu and John Paul Ricco

by David Kahn and Brooklyn Historical Society

by Dudu Quintanilha

Artist Kelvin Atmadibrata in Conversation with Oral Historian Benji de la Piedra

by Emily Bass and Yvette Raphael

by the People with AIDS advisory committee

A Conversation Between Szymon Adamczak, Luiza Kempińska, and Hubert Zięba

by Demian DinéYazhi' and R.I.S.E.

An Exchange to Expand on the PrEP Manifesto between Carlos Motta and John Arthur Peetz

A Conversation Between Mavi Veloso and Nicholas D’Avella

A Conversation Between Jean Carlomusto, Alexandra Juhasz, and Hugh Ryan

by Nelson Santos

by Tacoma Action Collective

by Vladimir Čajkovac

Cecilia Chung, Olivia Ford, Deon Haywood, Naina Khanna, Suraj Madoori, Charles Stephens