AIDS:
A Silenced History in the Balearic Scene

It is a complex task to delimit the history of AIDS to a specific context, since it is precisely its status as a virus, breaking all boundaries, that turned AIDS into an global epidemic. The history of AIDS is a collective history of names, stories and lives. It belongs to those who are no longer with us, and to those who have survived with the disease and are made to deal with other difficulties, faced with its chronic nature and undetectability.

S.I.D.A. was the name of a single released by the Balearic band Peor Impossible, at the time of one of the most critical moments of the disease, in 1985, two years after the first case was diagnosed in the Balearic Islands. An accursed syndrome, a disease which became a crisis, and an acronym that would definitively alter the panorama of the twentieth century. A history of silences that still today we are bound to tell.

As Élisabeth Lebovici has written, “when seeking to transcribe anew or recompose the public space of the struggle against AIDS, we are inevitably faced with the question of what remains, that is, the question of material culture.”[1] This material culture, this imaginary realm of rage and desire, where the associations fighting against AIDS have conserved an affective (and not merely documentary) archive of more than thirty years of struggle, rage and desire. Initiatives and projects such as Siloé, Alas and Can Gazà, without whose stories it would be impossible to give voice to this fragmentary history.

Yet the history of AIDS is also a history of imagery. An epidemic of signification, as Treichler would say, which in viral fashion entered into the halls of many white cubes, taking its place in the picture windows and display windows of many museums, telling us that Art Is Not Enough. “I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution. All the ideological apparatuses are, in other words, replicating themselves; because that’s the way the culture works. So if I function as a virus, an imposter, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions.”[2]

In this history of AIDS, then, in a similar vein to the work of Group Material or the chronologies of Gonzalez-Torres, projects like Tour de force by Joan Morey and Sida Social by Pepe Miralles live alongside actions like Pepe Espaliú’s Carrying and their connections with the Balearic Islands, and the focus on homosexual desire, touch and contagion in the work of Gori Mora.

This is a fragmentary history, constructed through the activation of one narrative that is hegemonic and another that is submerged, like in the well-known image of El mar [The Sea], by Agustí Villaronga. A memory that persists and resists, and a point of confluence for the Palma LGTBI movement, the gentrification of nightlife and the island’s lumpen queer, along with all those fights that have been silenced and made invisible for such a long time. A gap between memory and history which, citing Lebovici again, “by no means can exhaust all other narratives, being instead a vulnerable addition to them.”

[1] Élisabeth Lebovici, Ce que le sida m’a fait : art et activisme à la fin du xx^e siècle. Paris: Association des amis de la Maison rouge, éditions JRP-Ringier, 2017.

[2] Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joseph Kosuth and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, A Conversation, Clare Farrow (ed.), in A. Reinhardt, F. Gonzalez-Torres: Symptoms of Interference, Conditions of Possibility. London: Camden Arts Centre, 1994.