HIV/AIDS Memorial as Frictions of Transnational Resistance: The Global/Local co-presence of Tactile Folk Art alongside Virtual Digital Creativity
Authors: Pullen, C.
Conference: Media Frictions International Symposium
Dates: 2-3 May 2024
Abstract:The NAMES Project Memorial Quilt produced in 1985 in San Francisco, USA, may be considered as the first politicised community-based large-scale artefact, that celebrates the lives of individuals lost in the HIV/AIDS pandemic, forming a ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1992). As a tactile product of folk art exhibited in a shared social space, it inspired many others outside the US to produce national collections of AIDS quilt memorial, such as those in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, and the UK. However, since the rise of digital new media, many archives of national physical AIDS quilt collections are now easily accessible online. Also, digital space offers new transnational affordances for individuals and communities to create and upload their own global/local memorial visual content, such as within the Instagram account @theAIDSmemorial (TAM). However as digital media dominates, local community is increasingly losing its connection to the physical tactile craft-based memorial artefact, revealing a media friction between local/physical and transnational/digital forms. Hence, this paper considers the affordance of digital platforms to enable affective engagement (Cheriasia 2022), contextualising the historical and performative context of the physical AIDS quilt (Connell 2020; Testa 2022), and its connection to the local and the physical. As part of this, the work of Sarah Ahmed (2006) is framed in this paper to theorise issues of physical orientation within public areas of display, in comparing the virtual-immersive potential of digital ethnography (Underberg and Zorn 2013). Spaces of memorial within the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic appear to be shifting online, but the iconography of the historical physical AIDS quilt dominates, not only as a representational form, but also as a mode that celebrates copresence and interaction. The virtual and the tactile co-exist, not necessarily as sympathetic partners, but as vernacular and folk based frictions of resistance, that interrogate discourses of the transnational and the local.
Source: Manual