“His father died of hepatitis,” says the grandmother. “It’s not true, he died of AIDS. My parents died of AIDS,” corrects the granddaughter. This brief dialogue appears in a sequence that has just been released in theaters. The director closes her trilogy over the family, after And, with a story of self -fiction in which a young woman (Llúcia Garcia) travels to Galicia in search of information about her parents. The taboo of AIDS epidemic in Spain in the 1980’s and 1990’s is one of the topics that appears, with the characteristic subtlety of the director, in a film that draws a poetic portrait of a time and a country. What is personal is also political, and our history cannot be understood since the transition if we do not talk about two crises that were often very closely linked: heroin and AIDS. Into Pilgrimage They both appear, and the gaze of the young Marina (and his camera) is complemented by the hamstring silences of his paternal family. Silence and shame caused as much or more pain than AIDS.
In Catalonia, we miss many stories, in the arts and culture, that help us to draw a history of the human and social consequences of the Epidemic of AIDS in our country. Unfortunately, we have lost many writers and artists who could have talked to us in the first person, and our fictions have not deepened too much on the subject. As usual, we have often tended to look into the Anglo -Saxon world. It is symbolically very significant that it began its activity in 1996 with the text of the American Tony Kushner directed by Josep Maria Flotats. The montage, among many other reasons, would end up leading to the director’s removal. “A work of maricons and sidosos” to inaugurate the TNC (as it is said that it defined it) was much more than the convergents could endure at that time. It was again staged by this text in 2018, and in its two parts, directed by David Selvas and controversy, including an unfortunate cast decision (the director did not find a black actor, when floating he had done it twenty years earlier). Last season we saw, at the Montjuïc theater itself, talked about the transmission of memory between several generations of gay men in New York, and is set during the first victory of Donald Trump. “There is no homosexual of my age!” With this phrase, the character played by Abel Folk represented an entire generation that we lost because of AIDS. One of the most emotional moments in the montage of the Free came to the end of the first part, when a series of real “ghosts” went on stage and embraced one of the protagonists. Those men were volunteers from associations such as the Casal Lambda, BCN Checkpoint or the Yellow Panthers. His hugs merged reality and fiction, past and present, and were also a very emotional tribute to all those who suffered that epidemic. Both victims and survivors.
We need to have these kinds of stories told by our voices and in our language. Although scarce, contemporary Catalan theater can find some examples in which AIDS is present. He explained the life of Judge Samuel Gallart (embodied by Josep Maria Pou, in a kind of prefiguration of his cinematic Jordi Pujol), in which the manifestation of the Gay Liberation Front of 1977 was called, or the ravages that AIDS caused in Barcelona during the 1980’s were described. Clua Ja (Small Room of the TNC, 2010), a work located in four historical moments in which the shadow of HIV was undeniable. Smaller or alternative assemblies such as Discordant (Twisted theater) or José and Barcelona dissident (Lalinea) They have also dealt with the subject, using languages such as documentary theater or self -fiction. Continuing in the world of performing arts, it has sometimes been from more peripheral disciplines such as the dance where the subject has been touched more. , a show about death inspired by the movie of All that jazz. One of his most moving scenes was when the dancer and choreographer Montse Colomé (who was then sixty-four) explained his personal experience, when he accompanied some of his friends and fellow dancers in the 1980’s. The last floor of the Vall d’Hebron became the “convicted plant”, and many families rejected their children, who often died alone and helpless. Friends, as well is explained in the British series It’s a sin (‘Is sin’), were those who accompanied these young people in their last days of life. Pere Faura also presented (First Prova) In the Old Theater, in 2021, and has a four -handed project with playwright Jumon Erra (who received a Barcelona Scholarship) on the way several artists, social leaders and organizations managed the crisis of AIDS in Catalonia. Continuing in the dance world, choreographer and researcher Aimar Pérez Galí presented in 2016 The Touching Community In the Mercat de les Flors, a piece on the impact of the AIDS epidemic on Spanish and Latin American dance. The technique contact It is based on the improvisation and physical contact between the performers, and the reflection was negative of a crisis in which fear and misinformation caused many people to stop receiving kisses and hugs, as happened, years later, during the Covid pandemic, then without the stigma of HIV. With the Coronavirus we understood very well that no one is guilty of taking a virus, and none of us would have been to accuse a positive friend of Covid of having kept risky or unsafe practices. Covid vaccines arrived within a few months. HIV … We are still waiting for it.
“No one makes songs for anyone / and I have you in my body. / Everyone has reasons for everyone / and I feel you in my heart / in my heart / and in my heart.” Pepe Sales is one of our faulty faulty (or Damnaccording to the expression of), which must always be claimed, and is also the author of these “three agreements against AIDS”, which years later would version the singer -songwriter The poemary Love and drug songs It became, in 2003, a show directed by Alex Rigola (Pla was accompanied by the scene by the actress and composer Judit Farrés) and with the subtitle “ Pla is the Sales ”, the Sabadell reinterpreted a repertoire on camels, pharmacies and “ men as it should ”, carrying it in the 21st century and turning it into a heritage of our poetry and music. “Sant Cristo of the pharmacies / Tell the shopkeeper / give me the metzine / or remove the cross on the street.” In fact, Pla had already sung in AIDS, six years earlier and in a much more festive and ironic way, in the legendary album, a false concert published in 1997. In “Qué más me da si da or no da” turned the illness into the main theme of a song of love, with big band Included: “I will validate the penalty my life / If you are to blame for guilt. Love, transmission, illness and drug again: “If I do the love is enforced by it / no harm that by well no coming. In 1997 and in a very different tone, a folk air song that showed AIDS as in the late 1990’s, it had become a more or less common theme in the repertoire of our songwriters. “He died with a last look of incomprehension in the eyes / because what AIDS had was not him.”
As for literature ,. Their books Wild horses (L’Albí, 2016) o Formentera Lady (Labreu, 2015), in essence, deal with the impact of heroin on a whole generation of Catalans. AIDS also appears, of course, as a threat always latent or as an unexpected reality with which many of the Ionchians encountered who for years walked on the wildest corner of life. Most stayed along the way, and are all those who Cussà honor and turn into literary meat. We could also talk about Lumen, reissued in 2017, who arrived until 1985 and his entrance to a Paris clinic for the virus of human immunodeficiency. If in recent years international literature has given us novels as relevant as The great optimists of Rebecca Makkai (Porscope, 2021) the The children asleep of Anthony Passeron (Anagram, 2024) In an age when gay men suffered a strange disease. From his youth and without having experienced the crisis of AIDS in the first person, Guasch claims, through literature, personal and collective memory, a stack of years that have been developing pioneering organizations such as AIDS Studi (created in 1987) or positive gays (in 1994).
Memory is a very valuable tool for understanding and valuing the work done in Catalonia for the last forty years. Initiatives such as the Project of Name Association (created in 1993) continue to remind us, every World AIDS Day and through the Memorial Tapestry, the victims of this pandemic. Activist Ferran Pujol summarized it, in an interview a few years ago, with a scribe: “Between 1992 and 1996 everyone died.” Currently, the Prep (or pre -exposition prophylaxis) has greatly reduced, especially among men who practice sex with other men in white and western countries. If we are talking about the global south, it is another topic. “All together we can stop AIDS,” says Ferlandina Street: the work is part of the Macba collection and is already an inseparable element of the urban landscape of the Raval, such as the Statue of Columbus or the Botero Cat. In fact, we can give thanks to the MACBA because it is one of the few Catalan museums to have a lot of activity related to AIDS: exhibitions on the artist Pepe Espaliú (1996-1997), The Anarchy AIDS (2018-2019) or the current one Resistance prayerson the Colombian artist, where HIV obviously also appears (you can visit until October 26).
Between the Informative Tremendism of the 1980’s and the slow acceptance of the 1990’s (with the legendary television announcement “ Pontelo, Pónso ”), HIV is theoretically more normalized in our society today, but the serophobia or discrimination received by Seropositive people has not yet surpassed in all areas, such as labor. To return to PilgrimageCarla Simón’s new movie is a tribute to her parents, who portrays young and free, and at no time judges or condemns. Maybe things are changing? In a very different tone, the actors Joan Sureda and David Teixidó have been having the monthly podcast for a year, where they talk about topics related to the LGBTIQ+collective, sexuality or programming of 3cat. The same name of the Podcast is a topic of debate, and the couple claims that their listeners be self -proclaimed as “sidosos” without any shame: I especially recommend the episode where they talk with Giovanna Valls. We live in the time of the prep and reality “indetectable is equal to intransifiable”, and it seems that, luckily, things are beginning to change. But we need more than ever to have our stories, that arise from our culture and in our language. Also that of AIDS.
