THIS week our brothers and sisters in Mexico commemorate the accession of Hadrian as emperor of Rome with this hand-crafted bust.
The papier-mâché bust created by Carlos Oseguera Loranca is in the likeness of Mexican educator Antonio Salazar, nominated to become a saint of Antinous for his work in the Visual Documentation Workshop of UNAM.
Carlos, head of Epithimia Antínoo Mexíco, graciously guest authors the following blog article for us:
Salazar created in Mexico the Visual Documentation Workshop (TDV), cradled in the San Carlos Academy, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Its importance lay in the creation of leaflets, information cards and other printed materials, whose artistic roots worked to disseminate critical information on discrimination towards homosexuals, which was crossed by racism, classism, obligatory heterosexuality and the arrival of Epidemic of HIV / AIDS to the world.
The workshop came into being in 1984, only a couple of years after homosexual rights movements in other countries was beginning to be born and the HIV epidemic was making headlines.
Stigma and rejection of homosexuals were fueled by society's alarmist reactions to HIV, by considering that LGBT people were a "source of infection" or that the disease was a "divine punishment" sent by God.
"The workshop emerges in the effervescence of the homosexual liberation movement in our country, when marches, groups and protests take hold. It begins to generate a Mexican speech. From many points begin to join the struggle, one of them the Front of the Plastic Arts, whose greatest exponent is the Visual Documentation Workshop," said Salvador Irys, director of the International Festival for Sex Diversity (FIDS), in an interview for DISASTER.
The Front of the Plastic Arts was the first collective that began to address issues related to homosexuality in an artistic way.
Not all members of the workshop were openly homosexual, due to the social context, but under Salazar's leadership and steeped in communism, workshop participants created collective works that captured the concerns and problems of the LGBT population of that time.
"They said that art had to serve society and therefore not empower the artist, so they signed in a collective way, they released the rights of their works so that anyone could use them whenever and to promote these issues, there was A leading role. Their work focused on sexuality, class differences and religion, from which they created their discourse. "
"Their work was influenced by the arrival of HIV in Mexico, they were committed artists, they believed that art had a social purpose, if not, it was of no use. And as many of their friends start to become infected, they begin to create the first materials that have been made in this country about HIV, both artistic and broadcast, issues that were used to prevent and promote condom use."
Derogatorily called the pink cancer, due to the incidence of homosexual men cases, HIV broke into a gay community that found in sex a perfect refuge and a place of subversion before a society that criminalized, excluded and considered sick and sinful Their way of sexual and affective bonding.
Precisely, the importance of the Visual Documentation Workshop was that, faced with the panorama of disinformation and hate created around the epidemic, began to erect a visual discourse based on awareness and destigmatization.
"The workshop artists were among the first in Mexico to create a bridge between activism and art, they worked hand in hand with the gay liberation groups, there was a feedback. Some of the first signs of the marches were done by the TDV, some brochures of the organizations made them the workshop. They managed to articulate activism of homosexual liberation and art."
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