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Photo: Gilliam de la Torre

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Pink Death
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, USA.
with Jorge Sánchez

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Curated by Kevin Q. Ewing

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In Nazi Germany, a small piece of pink cloth in the shape of an inverted triangle was used to identify homosexuals, bisexual men and transgender women in concentration camps. Decades later, during the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s in the United States, the pink triangle was reappropriated in a vertical position as a symbol of resistance and solidarity, at a time when people living with HIV/AIDS were met with silence and indifference by institutions worldwide.

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Pink Death is a performance inspired by the experience of one of my closest artist friends, Jorge Sánchez, who has been living with HIV since 2018. It refers to the situation of vulnerability suffered by BIPOC communities in the United States and the Caribbean. This sector of the population is the most impacted by HIV/ AIDS for reasons that have nothing to do with culture or sexual behavior, as is often argued. This reality is linked to stigmatization, racism, poverty, HIV criminalization, and the lack of access to an adequate health system, as well as the lack of effective governmental responses that allow the spread of diseases in communities that simply do not have the resources to prevent them.

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A thread dyed with the blood from a close friend diagnosed with HIV forms an inverted triangle and holds me against the wall at neck height, creating a space in front of me where people can enter individually.

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Special thanks to Stamatina Gregory and Isabel Valli