Text by Christabel Stewart

VIVONO: Art and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy, 1982–1996 at Centro Pecci, Prato, follows the 15-year period between 1982 and 1996, during which the world of sexuality was turned on its head by the rapid growth of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Everyday expressions of desire suddenly carried mortal stakes, as did intravenous drug use, which had increased significantly in Italy in the early 1980s. Bringing together works created across divergent positions, each one tells of singular and collective experiences rooted in specific social, cultural and political contexts. Avoiding the patronising tone that risks accompanying exhibitions of this ilk, this show makes clear that before they are objects, all these works are people.

The 1980s in Italy were a period of ritiro (“retreat”) from the street protests and armed confrontations that characterised the “Years of Lead” in prior decades. Mass political militancy declined, replaced with a growing sense of fatigue and disengagement. Corruption, already rife across the political spectrum, became more deeply rooted in society, as would be dramatically revealed in the Mani pulite  the early 1990s. The HIV-AIDS epidemic in Italy ran concurrently with this shift towards capitalist consumption, and complicated its picture.

Included in the exhibition, which was curated by Michele Bertolino, are works by artists more obviously associated with the visual culture of AIDS: Robert Mapplethorpe’s eerie Coral Sea (1983), the wafting blue curtains of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Loverboy) (1989). Activist artist collective Gran Fury takes a more confrontational approach with their Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head (1988) installation, shown in Italy for the first time since the 1990 Venice Biennale, while posters from Arcigay, Italy’s oldest and largest gay organisation, emphasise sensuality and softness as a means for avoiding transmission.

Yet perhaps the exhibition’s most powerful work can be found on the mobile bulletin boards that flank the more traditional installations. Featuring documents, newspaper and magazine articles, posters and instructional guides curated by Valeria Calvino, Daniele Calzavara, and activist group Conigli Bianchi (the White Rabbits), the boards reflect the improvisatory spirit that characterised public health messaging in the absence of state support. The informal groups, associations, brigades and collectives that are featured in the archive reveal a uniquely intersectional network. Two-thirds of those who died from AIDS-related complications in Italy from the late 1980s to the late 1990s contracted the disease as a result of intravenous drug use. The epidemic was bound not only to queer life, but to other victims of the social fallout following the Years of Lead: drug users, sex workers, prisoners and migrants. The networks of solidarity forged between these groups became the links in a semiotic network that prevented a precipice from fully opening.

When Susan Sontag defined AIDS as a metaphorical disease in AIDS and its Metaphors in 1989, she highlighted how, from its very first manifestations, the epidemic had been laden with moral significance: a punishment for behaviours considered deviant. The equation between disease and guilt thus fuelled and continues to fuel violent forms of social exclusion. VIVONO (which translates to “they live”) insists instead on another equation: between life, relation and responsibility, refusing both moralisation and erasure in favour of a history written collectively, precariously and against the odds. .