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Welcome to the Stigma Sensorium:
a live, rhizomatic archive chronicalling experiences, affects and emotions of HIV stigma
Click on a word in the rhizome above to begin the journey, or keep scrolling to learn more about the project.
The Stigma Sensorium is an initiative by Project Stigma, and is led by Annette-Carina van der Zaag (Amsterdam), Rory Crath (Massachusetts) and Paul Boyce (Brighton) in close collaboration with fellow curators Rosa Abbott and Lucy Malone (London), Olga Saavedra Montes De Oca (Brighton/Havana), Anupam Hazra and Amrita Sarkar (Delhi), Denis Nzioka (Nairobi), Kumam Davidson Singh (Imphal) and Graciela Cain and Ari Gaskin (Jacksonville).
Through our collective engagements, we investigate the complex relations between virality (HIV and COVID-19) and the embodied meanings of stigma, sexual cultures, bio-medical technologies and queer politics. We seek to provide new understandings of stigma as generative instead of merely negative, vital for questioning who is able to partake in the post-AIDS future promised by global health initiatives. Project Stigma explores what it means for queer politics to begin with stigma, embarks from the etymology of stigma as body mark, symptom and wound and engages these materialities through theory, art and activism.
The Stigma Sensorium houses the visual-sonic landscapes produced at our sites, as well as our other knowledge-seeking practices: analyses, communications, musings, reflections, theory. These landscapes are a palimpset of art objects, theories, threads of pandemic communications and analysis that trace the differently embodied, locally contextualised experiences of stigma in their intimate relations to queer sexualities, trans embodiments, modes of racialization and virus. The Sensorium is open-ended and articulates our interest in the materiality of stigma, its fleshiness, felt affect, touch, its hapticality.