C: I’ll talk about my own experience. I was diagnosed with HIV in 1989, and was very ill for a couple of years. Yet, I owe my current active life to the fact that there were medicines developed out of recent research in bioengineering which allowed scientists to study the AIDS virus and design these very particular drugs that attack or inhibit its replication. It’s an example of how our ability to tamper with the bio-molecular world through technology has produced Protease Inhibitors which have literally changed the relationship of my body to the AIDS virus. Whereas once my body was just deteriorating before my very eyes, now it’s a body that functions very well. It’s an active body.

TNG: Your discussion of your body as "deteriorating" before your very eyes, makes me think about the relevance of abjection to the 1980s and early 1990s and how abjection is no longer as useful, or prevalent a mode, to the art of the mid- to late 90s. Currently we are in a different paradigm, one where "the active body" of biotechnological research is what is at issue and therefore different notions of what we are "naturally." And such a new notion of the body has a future; it is actually about the future.

C: Right, in the mid- to late 80s in relation to AIDS, the abjection of the body was its "truth;" one couldn’t understand the body in any other way because all we knew was illness and death. Now the reality of living with AIDS as an active body with a future is my reality.

A: Perhaps AIDS made us both more aware of this split between the experience of the deteriorating body versus the active/reanimated body. With this in mind, it’s interesting how our work has always dealt with both the very attractive and the very abject.

Link: www.azizcucher.net/home.php
Fecha de consulta: 04/12/2005

Fecha de modificaci�n: 04/12/2005 03:03