Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) & Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)
What is Real Stories Gallery ?
Real Stories Gallery Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, facilitates contemporary storytelling and collective witness through the arts for the purpose of raising awareness and evoking social change. Through storytelling, Real Stories works to prevent human rights violations related to HIV/AIDS worldwide.
Our initiatives include:
1)www.real-stories-gallery.org. Our international web-based ARTS & Storytelling initiative in partnership with Art For Humanity(Human Rights, Fine Art & Poetry) andCinematheque Films (24/7 international safe house and intensive arts program for male adolescents with HIVAIDS). A compassionate Foreword has been written by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize, 1984).
Our collaborative sketchbook of witness, our stories, permit us to introduce ourselves to each other, to our neighbours, strangers even. Stories compel us to feel; awakening empathy and courage. Our stories will survive when some distant generation turns to ask - "what were they doing. what were they thinking. how could they allow this to happen."
'Boys Bearing Witness with Candles' by Tim Barrus (Oil on Canvas, 2012)
2) Tristan's Moon. Our collaborative ART installation. Photography, video, poetry, fine art prints, photo-collages and tattoo art created by mentors and students expressing their inner lives and experiences in the context of the Convention on the Rights of the Child's optional protocol: Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography: a superhighway for the trafficking & transmission of HIV and related & ongoing human rights violations. Tristan's Moon is based at 36 Laight Street, Tribeca, New York 10013 (1 646 331 0117; realstoriesgallery@gmail.com).
United Nations Member States signed up to support this profoundly humanitarian protocol are responsible for securing the best interests for each violated child; ensuring their criminal justice and healthcare systems provide the appropriate & related medical, psychological, logistical and financial support necessary. It is imperative these promises are honoured, so together we prevent violated & infected kids from having to experience ongoing trauma within our communities.
In January 2012, for the first time since 1929, the US federal law on rape was updated by the Department of Justice. The new reading of the law now includes boys and men. What really pisses me off is that the vast majority of men who have sex with boys are married men with kids of their own. Why do people keep pretending it is not happening and thereby permit thousands of boys to continue being hurt, day after day. 1 in 6 males by the age of 16 is sexually abused in the USA and Canada. How many more photographic collages and art videos do we have to make before people believe it is happening in their neighborhoods. And around the world.
3) Show Me Your Life. Our online supervised & peer mentored art school program in collaboration with Cinematheque Films. We give Kodak Playsport cameras to kids at risk for HIVAIDS and Human Rights Violations. The kids create video art and photography to share their stories and raise awareness. Today we are working with students from around the world. Some of their work can be viewed in our collaborative ART installation at Tristan's Moon, based at 36 Laight Street, Tribeca, New York 10013 (1 646 331 0117; realstoriesgallery@gmail.com).
Cinematheque Films: The Studio Arts Education, and Show Me Your Life students (Real Stories Gallery Foundation) are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation in photographic, video and film production. Mentors and students have come together, whether they happen to be well or ill. We have much to learn from these young people, as they stroll into our lives with their stories told so ingeniously with compassion and guts. For it is not easy for anyone to speak of crimes against humanity's young in a public forum.
“forbidden fruit” by Michelangelo (Sistine Chapel, Vatican, 1508-1512)
"AIDS Genocide" by Tim Barrus, 2011
HIV can only be transmitted through infected blood, semen, vaginal fluids, and breast milk. A profound burden of culturally determined unkindness and cruelty related to perceptions surrounding HIV is being born by the most vulnerable members of our 193 United Nations Member States. Today's medicines can extend a person's life and reduce infectiousness by 95%; a sensible Global Health Policy.
Rachel Chapple, Ph.D (Anthropologist; Founder, Real Stories Gallery): As long as institutions and individuals fail to understand how thoroughly the creation of fear surrounding the social sexual human body permeates the very underpinnings of cultural thought and practice, then despite all the good will in the world, catastrophes such as today's HIV pandemic that affects the health and well-being of millions of people will continue to happen. And intentions, particularly the good ones, will continue to pave the way to conceptual and physical hell - our collective communities' HIV ghettos and patient queues, manned by friends and strangers seeking antiretrovirals from inadequately stocked clinics and pharmacies. We must ask ourselves, why. How can we choose to remain silent, when hundreds of millions of people are affected by the social transmitted Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Is it really so embarrassing to think about and to speak about a retrovirus predominantly transmitted from an exchange of bodily fluids that occurs through unprotected sex. If so, our humanity is surely dying of embarrassment.
we’re dead anyway/ i see them as if they were horses/ they have turned away the night/ far gone in stippled blueish-grey/ caught up by the old men who would herd them into the conduits/ granted tombs, pits, banishment from entire kingdoms into wild where the kicking up its life containing whatever exists of menace above the trees of men/ the old academic crones are dangerous — they would fit you into the status quo/ for darkness, blood, stones; death awaits the slaughterhouse/ tell the bones being such frames of us, lives and grows these years of streets for those who cum to play and pay to let out their rage and speak directly to the music of the marches/ the sun climbs in / such skateboards in what appears to be translucent exhortation similarly plastered on the walls of time/ for a rock even and flocking where/ o you fell then suddenly emerge from a concrete floor whose ascending shadows are, in fact, concentric shocks, what heavens will attend to unsuspected viral loads almost worn away against his better judgment back behind us like the rings around the moon in bright and thundering formation must be counted in the bloodstream’s complex twist/ i have always seen them like the burning herd of horses that they are/ pegasus whose memories of wings were not confined to metal cages where a nail was shot into your head robed in pretty pink and grease-stained floors/ the dim-lit hospital rooms and boundary lines of after all how many of them can the land support beyond contamination/ madness leads the inner selves to theatre’s stunning audience of whores who themselves tho remain nomadic in the rounding up where the running through the dust of risk that the nail could be for them finished with its meat-packing protocols of blessing in disguise/ such a stallion’s noise when mounted by a man or another stallion, unborns where the tongues and wanting rubs the asshole clean/ the lure will come crashing to its roots of plunder — whipped on and slapped — the sun to swirl its milk in throats and thighs to be released back into a wilderness unbending where when man arrives and upon the salt and licks inundate our breathing sleep; our speaking spoke of speaking and our boots outrun by longing that spills so deep within us, the impudent among us can be counted on to kick the doors in/ how everything turns away/ the afterglow unfolding/ the stirrups still clinging to the groin and to the bed/ yet still the landscape as seen from above in flights/ falls away in ruin faster than a horse can gallop/
Human trafficking is not about the journey, and it’s not about the destination. Human trafficking is the trains, the ovens, and the stench from chimneys. Human trafficking compels you to go where they want you to go. Human trafficking is always fundamentally the same navigation through volatility and death. It is enslavement. Prostitution is not always a lifestyle choice. It was a basic problem of survival. Follow the fucking money. Whoring ruined my life and my health. It will be what eventually kills me. There were no other choices. There was no food to eat. I sold my body to men. What would you do in order to survive. Stop judging me from your safe house. It was a secret world of desperate clinging to whatever drove you to tomorrow. Tomorrow arrived on wings of wax, corpses, disease, and always, always the destruction of any inner ability to feel anything at all. We could eat. There was food. It was not enough.
Anonymous (Show Me Your Life, Asia)
Tim Barrus/ From high overhead, we see the frozen Russian landscape slip beneath us as our flight takes off for Asia. A cacophony of sounds and voices. We wade through the maddening crowds. The boys for sale are almost invisible. Almost is the operant idea here. We see them set against the heterosexual landscape even as it melts like ice. We see the hookers waiting. We see a landscape saturated with the quid pro quo of sex. We see the bare bones of survival. Everything around them flashes with a contrived beat and a forced light. Smokin’ heroin. Chasing dragons. They are only there. The men who seek them out know where to look. Knowing how to blend in, too. It is the year of the hyena. It is always the year of the hyena. It is the planet of hyenas. There is the stereotypical tragedy of a lost childhood. But it’s about more than that. The loss is the loss of life itself. What does homelessness mean. What does survival sex mean. What does abandonment mean. We see them talking about what they want. They want to be loved. They want to be wanted. I find this an almost stunning commonality. I want someone to love.
"there are as many stories in a dance as there are dancers to tell them"
Sucht der Junger (Show Me Your Life, Germany)
Sehnsucht is a German noun translated as "longing", "yearning" and "craving," or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing." However, Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately and describes a deep emotional state. Its meaning is somewhat similar to the Portuguese word saudade. The writer Georg Tabori called Sehnsucht one of those quasi-mystical terms in German for which there is no satisfactory corresponding term in another language. Sehnsucht is a compound word, originating from an ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht).
Tim Barrus/ In the constricted universe of the at-risk kid, addiction and the issues of addiction, both socially and medically, are hard realities no one in this context can escape. They are ubiquitous to culture. Addiction in Germany is still addiction. Addiction in Texas is still addiction. The only variables are the degrees to which criminality is misinterpreted.
Sucht der Junge is not at-risk for addiction. He’s an addict. That is not how he sees himself. Does it matter how the kid sees himself. This one sees himself as a dancer.
In order to understand what the term at-risk means, we’ve frequently taken what already is, and we put a “might happen” tag on it. When, in fact, it can be a done deal by the time we get there.
At-risk for school failure cannot be applied to kids who have already failed at fitting into the system. Educational systems do not accommodate. They are inherently designed to discriminate.
At-risk for sexually transmitted disease cannot be applied to a kid who has HIV. That train left the station. As long as we fail to appropriately identify exactly who the kid is, we get to put his failures on him. At-risk for suggests that the kid can turn this around by himself, and when he can’t we can shrug and wash our hands of it.
At-risk for addiction cannot be applied to a kid who is already incarcerated by a court to a drug rehab program.
The kids are already there. By throwing around the term “at-risk,” we are perpetuating a denial the kid is already aware of and the adult wishes could be treated and shoved under the rug.
It’s not that simple. It is the stuff of adolescence to question everything. To create their own tribes.
We've been working with Sucht der Junge for eight months, now. This is the video we have to show for it because at some point with a video you have to be able to put it down and say: this is the best I can do.
Adults won’t like it. The testosterone level alone is off the charts. In real unconscious ways, adults will feel threatened by the muscular assertiveness in the dancing. It’s stylized, but not in ways adults are used to seeing dance. It’s not about my world. It’s about kids at-risk. It’s about the challenges they face. It’s about the kid constructing a picture that speaks to the story that is his life.
But no matter what, the kid simply seems to keep on dancing. Show me your life.
Konol (Show Me Your Life, Australia)
Born to Be Wasted — Blood to Fire
Tim Barrus/ It took Konol and Cinematheqe eight months to construct Born to be Wasted — Blood to Fire. It represents many aspects to Konol’s existence living with HIV in Australia. No. No. Yes. Yes. From blood to fire. Show me your life.
Umthombo (Show Me Your Life, South Africa)
Dannyboy (Show Me Your Life, USA)
Tim Barrus/ Make no mistake about it, the kid’s on fire. The other junkies call him Dannyboy. The kid has major learning disabilities. I doubt that he has written a sentence in his life. His video is short, but it’s all the attention span he has. I don’t treat junkies. I don’t deal with addiction as a sickness. Mainly because that’s not my job. My job is to facilitate kids at-risk in expressing themselves. I met Dannyboy when I was visiting Los Angeles and staying at the Alta Cienega Motel in West Hollywood, where Danny was living with other night creatures of his kind. No parents. No school. Danny deals drugs, and he’s a thief. When I met him I thought he was most definitely at-risk, and I think that now. The only difference between the Danny then and the Danny now is the cough. I suspect tuberculosis. There has to be something redeeming about this kid. Even if you have to turn over boulders the size of mountains to find it. Danny’s into sports. Even if he does attend most sports events either high on meth or zombied out on heroin. I do not know Danny’s world. And either do you. Those of you who are shaking your head knowingly, know nothing of this landscape. Stop pretending. I did not know that Danny could focus his head around images that are mainly of the spectators at any given game. He’s curious. But there is something off about the speeds at which the neurological connections here are made. You can put any kind of moral on this story that you want. It’s still Dannyboy who is living it.
Liu (Show Me Your Life, Tibet)
Liu Floating In Life
**the soundtrack is a poem written by the sixth Dalai Lama; background voices are Liu's friends singing.
Diego (Show Me Your Life, Spain)
La danseuse se dishabille (Thedancer undresses)
I'm Diego.I am 19 years old. I live in the Barcelona, Spain.I was adancer.Thedisease AIDSis killingme. I am dancing in themovie.I havenerve damage. The medicineshave hurtme.I can not dance anymore. I can only make videosof dancers.
Pascal (Show Me Your Life, France)
Tim Barrus/ Pascal is a sixteen year old patient suffering from HIV and schizophrenia at the Maison Blanche Hospital in Paris where he has assembled for Show Me Your Life — à risque: lumière et movement. A collage of sound, motion, dance, and metaphor that explores the perceptions he has of the world around him.
brothers running from a fire they did not create/ infected/ turning purple under the weight of enormous summer clouds/ you cannot just summarily and arbitrarily split them up/ i will not allow it/ i’m telling you they would die/ like seed packets through pasturage/ pills and pain/ one kissing at a time/ under the aegis of the flames above you/ run boys run/ stop but you are breaking free/ unaffiliated with silhouettes/ you find the wandering oblivion/ flashes cross the memories of lucidity with fire/
your whispering was what had been the piercing of your eyes/ the discordant street/ that pulls cold stone over cuts that tie the threads/ to you, to all your minutes/ through corridors of medical indifference/ who were you to question anything/ let alone identity/
Human Rights Abuses & The Trafficking of HIV
Today, the trafficking of HIV directly affects the lives of millions of children who are reaching for their adulthoods within our communities. Within this context our stories and images permit us to introduce ourselves to each other within and across borders. Our stories and images compel us to feel, to imagine, to empathize and to care. To care enough to encourage our families and friends and neighbours to imagine a world in which all 192 United Nations Member States ratify and enforce the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the two Optional Protocols that directly impact the lives of millions of children by facilitating the trafficking of HIV and cruelty: the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, and the use of children in armed conflict where HIV is increasingly being employed as a weapon of war.
Lusala (Show Me Your Life, Southern Sudan)
Nuit
The average price to purchase a Southern Sudan boy slave is $35. Boy slaves are repeatedly gang-raped by their Arab Masters. The United Nations took the firm position that genocide and slavery were world crimes, should be eradicated and those engaged in it should be put on trial by the world court in The Hague, (Resolution 260 (111 A), UN General Assembly). This action has been the modis operendi in the case of Kosovo. Yet the world has not addressed the crimes being committed in Southern Sudan.
Dear Tim Barrus (Director, Show Me Your Life). You do not write enough. When you write, I listen. Sometimes I grow very dark inside in order to listen. But I listen. When you said show me your life you had my complete attention. I have never believed that white people wanted to know anything about my life. You white people were the teachers, the lawyers, the doctors, and the law. All my life. We were there to shine your shoes, and kiss your white ass. You don’t need to know who I am. Know this, white boy. I do not believe and I do not know anyone who believes that if you just work hard enough, it’s going to happen for you. My work will never be anywhere near the center. It will only happen at the edges. The edges where slavery is no abstraction, and abstraction is exactly that. When I heard that you were doing Show Me Your Life I thought you do not mean me. Exchanging places. Is it about how I made this as a black man who has no access. Or is this about what story is being told and has been constructed as metaphor and images. White people won’t like it. Black people will not like it anymore than white people. Or maybe it is not about race at all. I suspect it is far more about voice than anything. I feel like my voice is always dancing in the darkness and the best I will ever do is called just barely hanging on. Lusala.
How can we see Africa without confronting the past.~~ Tim
Children murdered by soldiers in the Congo. One child.
You held his hand his camera held....a vision, gestating.
One sees the animism
one sees the transcendence the black, black skin
of which the whites were innately envious.
We are fashioned of school paste. I ask you
How do we stop writing of trauma when trauma
exists meteors of trauma
flesh entering the atmosphere of hatred of stupidity
of mistrust
entrails burning until the rock makes
its mark in the canyon.
I cannot see a piece of glass in any manner
as I once did a piece of wood
blood on a medicine man's doll: what is white magic
what is darkness called upon
as the gold skinned snake is called upon
mid-apocalypse ? My brother who traveled the 3rd world
extensively once said all who live in America are
spoiled. I wonder.
How does one speak of Africa indeed of life at all
without speaking of the past?
I peel my chalked skin
it does not make me weep the pain
my own pain is nothing.
I hear the voices of the damned
those damned by humanity
those tangled in the apparati of the penal colony.
I hear the voices of the damned
paired with flute violin brushes heaped with color
such are the voices of the damned
ripely coiling upward strangling tree strangling
what does not permit them to reach sky.
Moise (Show Me Your Life, RépubliqueDémocratique du Congo)
Sur la rivière. Ces vidéos sont dangereux à faire. Je dois arrêter de les faire pendant quelques jours
Tim Barrus/ Moise was Show Me Your Life's first student. Moise died in March 2011.
Moise died. Why, Tim, why. And not from AIDS but from his infected machete wound so in the end it was AIDS that became a warzone. I know he felt trapped. By the virus that is violence. By his survival and running. By seeing his family killed like that. By soldiers on one side and soldiers on the other side.
I would argue that it is a crime against humanity to rape either men or women and use HIV as a biological weapon. I am going through Moise’s video clips to see if there is anything I can convert into a still. It is difficult stuff to look at. I cannot imagine surviving it. He is not quite out of the woods yet. They can hear gunfire from the clinic.
In many countries, the intentional or reckless infection of a person with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is considered to be a crime. People who do so can be charged with criminal transmission of HIV, murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, or assault. Some states have enacted laws expressly to criminalize HIV transmission, as in the United States, while others charge under the existing laws, as in the United Kingdom.
Raymond Fils: This is for Moise. I am your Cinematheque Films video mentor. The video you have sent me is shocking. I have never seen a human being beheaded before. At first, I did not know what to say. I do not see how we can show a human being beheaded by soldiers. I am sorry. I am sorry you had to see this. I am sorry you are trying to run from these soldiers. Here is what I think we can do. I think I can try to get some still photography from this video. It is very dramatic. I will do that and we can still tell this story that you are fleeing soldiers, who are raping and killing people village to village. I am praying for you to live. You need to know that I will always tell you the truth. This project was designed for something less than this. But we need to know this is happening in your part of the world. That does not mean I know how to make what photographs we will come up with important. But I will try. Please be as safe as possible. I am in awe of your ability to survive this. Your friend, Raymond.
Jasha (Show Me Your Life, Russia)
Cornered
I am always feeling cornered. By death. By the life that encircles me with walls and cubicles and boxes and the weight of history and the gravitas (translator’s word) of definitions and old dead bones. I feel trapped in languages and with Tim translating; Tim writing it down as we attempt to work together and bridge what is human to the two of us — Tim, what does this mean please write it down I do not understand — what death means and what life means now and me hearing but I do not know what anyone means anymore. Moise died. Why, Tim, why. And not from AIDS but from his infected machete wound so in the end it was AIDS that became a warzone. I know he felt trapped. By the virus that is violence. By his survival and running. By seeing his family killed like that. By soldiers on one side and soldiers on the other side. This video is for Moise. I learned a lot from you. Tim says learn one. Do one. Teach one. This is the doing. I do not know what “Cornered” says. The video is my voice. The images themselves are only stories. Narratives like the Russian doll inside the doll inside the doll inside the smiling doll. It’s all a prison. We are imprisoned. We all have bars that keep us caged. I grew up disassembling all those dolls. Now, I only want to reconstruct them so I can understand what was actually on the inside. It doesn’t really matter if Tim screws up with translations. It’s only important that we see what was on the inside of the doll is the doll. There are no answers to a Russian mystery. That is what HIV and AIDS are to most Russians. Another mystery and maybe it is not real. We suspect everything. To only reveal a litany of dolls that that are pulled from my bad dreams of being chased and scars and outer shells. I told Moise he would have great scars when he healed. But then he said, “They will kill visual poetry.
**click on thumbnail above, or visit the gallery and explore the hundreds of images and stories gifted for exhibition today. If you would like to participate, or are interested in contacting the artist or poet, please email http://realstoriesgallery@gmail.com
Sexually Violated Males Infected with HIV/AIDS Debut Art Show in New York City
"Tristan's Moon" opens to the public, showcasing real stories expressed by young males ensnared in the international commercial sex industries and living with the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS
NEW YORK, Jan. 10, 2012 -- Throughout the United States, one in every six males under the age of 16 is a victim of sexual abuse. More frightening, many are immersed in sex trafficking and at extremely high risk for contracting and dying from HIV/AIDS or related illnesses, substance abuse and suicide. From the beginning of abuse through death, these young people typically suffer in silence with no hope of appropriate or consistent medical care, justice or safety. The sale of children, child prostitution, child pornography, sex trafficking, HIV/AIDS and ongoing human rights violations are the motivation behind a disturbing yet powerful 2012 art show at Real Stories Gallery Foundation in Tribeca, New York.
The "Tristan's Moon" art installation is the collaborative effort of young artists and their mentors. Thanks to Tim Barrus and Les Garcons de Cinematheque Films, founder and residents of an international safe-house and innovative arts program, these artists have been given a voice through artistic expression. Real Stories initiatives are showcased at http://www.real-stories-gallery.org with a foreword by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. Tristan's Moon is also the first human rights brick-and-mortar gallery of its kind, revealing personal stories through video, poetry, music, tattooing, photo collages and fine art prints.
"Tristan’s Moon spotlights a tragedy experienced by thousands of young males worldwide, including the United States," says Dr. Rachel Chapple, Real Stories founder, anthropologist and mother of four children (three boys). "One startling story is the vast majority of abusers are married men with children. This and other realities make it a difficult story to share and to witness. But we must, if we are to end the trauma happening on our watch. Tristan’s Moon reveals the creativity and guts of young males forced to survive in an abusive adult environment, and their extraordinary empathy and compassion. We have much to learn from these remarkable young survivors. Tristan's Moon will be a life-changing experience for anyone who witnesses it."
Tristan’s Moon is a conversation raised by Real Stories in collaboration with Cinematheque Films and Art for Humanity, which have gifted their international fine art and poetry human rights portfolios. Other notable contributors include composer Philip Glass and Dunvagen Music Publishers (Satyagraha: “confrontation and rescue”); tattoo artist Anthony "Civ" Civorelli, lead singer for the punk band Gorilla Biscuits; and SumanaWitherspoon-Ghosh, assistant to Vanity Fair's art director.
Tristan's Moon is located at 36 Laight Street, Tribeca, NY 10013. Please ring the bell to enter (Monday through Friday). For private viewings, ask Rachel at realstoriesgallery@gmail.com; 646-331-0117.
Real Stories Gallery Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, facilitates contemporary storytelling and collective witness through the arts for the purpose of raising awareness and evoking social change. Through storytelling, Real Stories works to prevent human rights violations related to HIV/AIDS worldwide.
# # #
to touch. just. being. alive.
the art of it and the guts of it escape my morbid hand/ you can deny that they exist but what you see, and what you do not see, and what you deny, and what you do not deny is irrelevant/ it is not germane to their existence that you see them/ your indifference is meaningless because they will demand to live their lives without either your approval or acceptance/ it’s not about you/ it’s about them/ i would wear a pink triangle but i don’t know how to sew/ excuses, excuses/ don’t tell me i cannot do what i do because i am doing it/ i do not need your permission or anyone’s permission/ i am not talking about doing it/ i am doing it/ no, no/ yes, yes/ my question to you is: how do i imbue them with a humanity after they have been through what they have been through/ they would mash their very mothers into the matrix/ yes, yes/ no, no/ yes/ just being alive/ to touch/ is being infected to the bone against the throat/ to touch what/ my blind eyes drilling knives through the masks of stone/ touch shimmering and disappearing/ carving out the deeper dreams of things to touch among the dead/ the past is iridescent streaked with the boatman’s sweat/ self-righteousness gets my ass up in the morning/ and next the heart declines to find the whirling of a shore/ heavy as the savage cave alive and writhing in the silence of the shattered, fast-bound curse/ to touch the barbs and wire/ my scratching twilight with its furious stare murmuring i was loved once by a sullen and fleshless wind/ and sailors fallen faster/ and over this glimmering river broke all the desolate nudes in stark and bewinged detail/ to touch/ being touched/ carving out the heart/ to touch/ don’t tell me i cannot do what i do because i am doing it/ i do not need your permission or anyone’s permission/ i am not talking about doing it/ i am doing it/ no, no/ yes, yes/ yes/ my question to you is: how do i imbue them with a humanity after they have been through what they have been through/ mash mashed/ yes, yes/ no, no/ yes/ just being alive/ is not enough/ you have to walk that walk/ oh, humanity/ you have to give them what they have anyway/
because it belongs to them/
denial is the tongue from hell/ denial is the indelible smell of char/ denial is the darker, sooner death draped around your neck by the sneering status quo/ denial is the anchor of your hate/ denial is your whore to paradise the glowing and the knowing pink things three squares flush on flush/ denial is the retch infinitely attended to by the curling of a peasant with a bullet in his brain/ denial is the message giving birth to acidic spill that soaks all mourning in retreat/ denial is the soak of drought upon which a pirouette like god salts a suicide/ denial is the drag of knowledge down the tearing street so necessary for a pathos nourished by spit alone/ denial’s breath is vile/ and where have you ever shown me beyond your flesh’s stretch marks that what you think matters/ why does what you think matter/ why does what you deny matter/ you knocking on doors declaring that your hollow matters/ how do you matter/ why do you matter/ you have never explained this/ you have never articulated in an open mike at the reading why your venom should be my blood/ why/ why/ why is your droning buzz in monotone backlit by significance/ you, hater/ how is it that your desire for revenge should be mine as well/ your hissing only leaves a shrinking shell for your epic migraine and the trotting off/ denial is the shield you ache with to ward off blood/ denial is the shame of fate/ denial is the rubble of a set of lungs stirring in a winter’s rearrangement of reality/ denial is the kingdom of the shadows governed by the jackals of your shock/ and where is it written by your hands of stones that we all should burn with it/ on your hands and knees/ why is it that you matter/ how is it that i am compelled to choke on your petrification/ some mean proof imbued with panic’s suffering/ how is it that i should run with you and facing away/ gesturing to the space you occupy that covers your disturbance/ denial is the end of nothingness and a freedom from the past and the wounded dream of a memory whose spin is a shifting of the passages wave-to-wave teething on nothing more than bones and the slow spread/
of reason’s ashes/
they are not your children/ your children are not your children/ i didn’t make it up/ nothing is original/ not you/ not me/ we are frozen as copies of ourselves/ stand at attention/ do not look around or you will be shot/ or are you are the indifference/ or are you are the people in the town who do not know who know/ who know/ who know/ no, no/ oh, yes, oh yes/ you know/ you are the guards/ you are the gates/ you are the wire and the barb/ you are the ovens and the smoke of faggots/ razzle dazzle, baby/ they are doing it without you/ for themselves/ you cannot abide the idea of it/ the trains in the background are only trains/ they can cum for anyone/ not us we paid our mortgage we sent our kids to college we bought a car we did all the right things/ we did all the right things/ but they are cuming for you, too/ no, no/ you can deny that they exist but what you see, and what you do not see, and what you deny, and what you do not deny is irrelevant/ it is not germane to anyone that you see them/ your indifference is meaningless because they will demand to live their lives without either your approval or acceptance/ it’s not about you/ it’s about them/ the reality of now is juxtaposed against what went down back then because it has to be/ flashing and dancing to a touching of the dreams/ where is this humanity i speak of to be found/ you either hear the music of it or you don’t/ there is no middle ground/ of course, i’m a liar your body’s nice, too/ in the background are the faces of the walking dead/ oh, denial/ the ovens of your hateful tongues mean you you you/ i would wear a pink triangle but i don’t know how to sew/ excuses, excuses/ the art of it escapes me/ no, no/
Twenty years ago, as we watched and willed each footstep Nelson Mandela placed away from the Victor-Verster Prison, we became reborn as a free nation. What we saw, said and felt on that day in February 1990, is imprinted in our spirit and has made us change our lives. It was the day we knew that our fight to dismantle racial apartheid had been won. It was a day for international celebration. Our friends around the world shared our joy, as together we stood up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. What a wonderful gift we created for our children and our grandchildren. We could look at them in the eye and proudly declare our legacy of freedom to them.
Today when I look back over the emerging years of our freedom in South Africa, I see a new nation. Sadly, though, I also see a menace that was not dispelled twenty years ago and lives in the shadows created by our silent acceptance. That menace is the scourge of HIV and AIDS, the scourge that today rushes through the bodies of our people, old and young. And everyday when we let our fears cast the shadow, we let the menace grow. Let us reach out to our brothers and sisters and not speak in hushed tones of shame; but instead let them know that we care. It is time for us to nurture kindness within our homes and to reach out for joy born of freedom and respect.
Today our international communities of storytellers are giving us the opportunity to come together and stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. I invite you all to join us, so we may harness the power of our humanity and our enormous capacity for creativity, to mobilize our imaginations and weave together through our stories, a vision that we shall reach for which will influence our thoughts and actions towards our kin.
God bless you
Daniel Ben-Horin(Founder & Co-CeoTechSoup Global, USA)
I have watched Real Stories Gallery evolve from the outset - a pure vision encountering huge obstacles, but never wavering. The result is what you see: An inspiration to all of us, a path forward for our hearts and minds (and bodies) and a reminder of how technology is there to fulfill human creativity and meet human needs.
"collapsed veins" by timbarrus & cinematheque
Nevertheless... with the economy in the toilet, more and more kids are living on the street and in the system. In this particular community which prides itself on family values, the real statistics for kids in the system are staggering. Here’s the reality: 90% of every child in the system here in the USA, who makes it to the age of 18 will be in prison before they are 19; which is obviously almost all of them. They’re in rest areas. They’re in truck stops. They’re in whorehouses and shooting galleries and meth labs. To be in foster care means you are going to prison. How many of them are HIV by the age of sixteen. 42%. 42% of kids in foster care before the age of 16 will get HIV. They will enter prison infected. How many of that 42% will have a history of sex work. 98% of the 42% will have that history. In other words, for our family values community, almost all kids in foster care go to prison and by then half will be infected and 90% infected from unsafe sex with tricks.
Western Europe has turned it around. Almost all infections now are through IV drug use. But in the States, the most vulnerable kids are the ones in the system, and the chances of them becoming infected are 70%. For a kid in a family, it’s less than one percent of a percent. That means that for a kid in the system, the chances of getting HIV are seven hundred times more than any kid in a family. We fail them by the boatload. We fail almost all of them.
Erik (Show Me Your Life, USA)
“My Teacher Says I Have No Brain”
Oliver McTernan (Broadcaster, Writer, Author Violence in God's Name; co-Founder & Director, Forward Thinking)
I had the privilege of visiting Tunisia during its revolution earlier this year and meeting with some of the young people who through their courageous actions brought momentous change to that country. In the course of our conversations it became clear that these young people had overcome the fear that had dominated their lives and were prepared to risk all in their quest for dignity and agency. They were no longer prepared to tolerate the climate of repression that had robbed them of self respect and freedom to control of their own lives.
It was a deep sense of accumulated grievances and injustices that motivated them to act to change their lives in a decisive way.
It is well documented of course the significance of the internet in facilitating the changes. People were empowered by the ability to communicate.
They used their computers and mobiles not only to organise but to tell their stories.
It was soon after returning from Tunisia that I was introduced to the work of the Real Stories Gallery.
It struck me that it is the same quest for dignity and agency that motivates these young people from around the world who have been the victims of abuse to tell their stories.
Through the use of videos they too are learning to overcome the fear that has gripped their lives and to discover their intrinsic dignity despite what may have happened to them in the course of their early lives. I fully recommend the work the Real Stories Gallery who provide these young people with a chance to be free.
One step from the body history is made by Carolyn Srygley-Moore (poet, USA)
A step from my body history begins:
the electric fan sounds like a warplane.
I am tired of hearing sounds
that are not valid. It is only an electric fan
not the neighbor with the short cropped yellow hair walking her white dog.
She disparages to say hello.
Our house is overgrown with thistle. With wings, not conceptual
but real. Who are you, man
walking the train trestle like Wilde bearing a parasol
for balance? The incapacity to love
is what breaks the heart what shatters the very moon.
Cored like an apple the hen beaks
the very necessity of light by which history is made
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.
When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.
When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
The trafficking of human beings is an HIV superhighway
"Traffickers are always one step ahead"
Trafficked boys and girls are frequently raped and exposed to violent sexual behavior, which can cause tissue tears that make HIV transmission more likely. Trafficked boys and girls are rarely tested, diagnosed, and treated for the disease, thus allowing AIDS to develop. When they contract HIV, they continue to be forced to have unprotected sex with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of men before exhibiting any symptoms. The cross-border transportation which often accompanies sex trafficking operations also spreads the disease, as one infected victim can infect the men who buy a boy or girl in several different regions or countries. Those men may then infect other partners, both in and out of the commercial sex industry. Furthermore, some cultural myths about AIDS, like the idea that sex with a virgin will cure an HIV infection, cause infected men to seek out unprotected sex with young trafficked boys and girls. And so the cycle continues.
Eastern Europe and Africa are two of the fasting growing regions of human-trafficking and modern-day slavery in the world. The USA is the number one country of destination for slaves to be trafficked to. Children are abused, raped or beaten to death in the sex slave trade, professional begging or in forced manual labor camps. Then they are easily (and cheaply) replaced from this abundant ‘pool' of destitute children barely surviving in the sewers and tunnels of Romania and Russia… so on and so on.
in rooms
and he waited to couple on the steaming nights or the colder nights up against the streetlight plunging into snow/
hot, cold, it hardly mattered with the angles of it dripping down his face when they came on him/
blind leagues and golden greeds with the angles of it sensing death’s accord inside the body count, he would survive today/
a meal somewhere/ these immediate things/ were all a russian boy could dream of/
perhaps half an hour on a computer where the gameboys played and he surfed the web for what might be compassion that would cum his way/
to hope/
in a landscape where hope was a mythology/
to dream however briefly of being yet consumed in alliances with whatever he could sell/
to eat/ to not be hungry/ to not get arrested/
he had already eloped from how many warehouse orphanages and conduits to human trafficking/
perhaps enough sucking cock to buy some glue to blot the screaming hunger out breathing deeply from the paper bag/
which, for its part, the hunger, eats at the hole in his gut whenever he shits blood in the squatting in the middle of the subway tracks/
holes being the crawling down into the labyrinthine maze of darkness he lived in/
his mind bursting at the lifting, heaving overhead, of a bloody axe/
o moscowleningradsky train station 30,000 children live inside your filthy anal hole/
with the angles of it sensing only one way awaiting equilibrium and all of them are where your guts collide
with the feeling of fatigue saluted at the grave of body counts and all the laid it down and falling in/
and they want to talk to me of hope/
do not talk to me of hope/
help me take two across the border and the get-them-the- hell-out/
of there/
or is that too radical a notion for you to do/
do not talk to me of hope and medication/
talk to me of how you will be getting off your white ass/
talk to me of art in motion/
talk to me of body counts where the angles of it sensing death’s accord takes his hand and pulls the boy by his lifetime
across the threshold of a hundred years of pandemic’s voices singing champion/
**There is a story circulating today that if an infected man has unprotected sexual intercourse with a virgin child (female or male) they will be cleansed of HIV. The TRUTH is that the man will remain infected with HIV. And the child will be HURT, and infected with HIV. The second danger lies when intergenerational sexual intercourse occurs. Smaller bodies tear and legion easily, and that provides easy access for HIV to enter a young body. "Even when he was HIV-positive he still wanted sex. He refused to use a condom. He said he cannot eat sweets with the paper wrapper on" (Uganda, 2002 - "Just Die Quietly").
“Mary Mother Of No-One” by LindiweNkutha(South Africa; Art For Humanity)
Yet again unfounded myths
re-write themselves on my body
faceless malevolent voices
proclaim me the virginal cleanser
of heartache and dis-ease
while taking turns to fill me to the brim with same
my shrills swathed in regal stoles of collective silence
lie behind consensual paralytic truths
that have never walked,
let alone flown
i watch with a throat full of swallowed words
while my consent is sacrificed on alters to inconsiderate gods
it crushes the bones in my heart
that no one ever hears the
two, sometimes three, mostly seven pleadings
that drip out of the sides of my mouth
onto my pillow now gone deaf
Professor Paul Webley (Director, School of Oriental & African Studies, UK)
Stories and narratives help define who we are, and help us understand our world and what it means to be human. And the stories on the magnificent Real Stories Gallery will do all that - but will also have an impact on the world, and help reduce the spread of HIV.
Show Me Your Life
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again
And interesting
And modern
The country is grey
And brown and white and trees
Snows and skies of laughter are always diminishing
Less funny, not just darker
Not just grey
It may be the coldest day of the year
What does he think of that
I mean, what do I
And if I do
Perhaps
I am
Myself again
"Mizu" (water) by Michio and Joseph
Tim Barrus (Director, Show Me Your Life & Sexwork; Founder, Cinemateque Films): Michio is a 12-year-old boy from Japan. We have recently been talking a lot about the idea of struggle and the idea of survival. Michio has been working with Joseph from Cinematheque Films, and they have put together this video Michio calls “Mizu.”
- Stanley Kunitz -
“I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
Tim Barrus (Director, Show Me Your Life; Founder, Cinemateque Films): It’s very dark out there. You can barely see the trees in a wood of shadows. I do not think we have the slightest clue as to who or what a kid at-risk is. Children never live the lives that have been assigned to them. They’re too vibrant. I have roamed through wreckage, too. To tell those stories, you have to possess a dead ahead vision, you have to be willing to fight for the story, you have to say: this is mine. The videos are beginning to come in. They are from all over the world. The stories are about the lives of kids who are usually kept shut up and shut away. They aren’t living the cultural television myths of television children. They’re struggling to survive. The woods are still dark. You can barely see the trees. But we are all writing our books of transformation.
The ghetto has its own images. It is allowed. It is why there is a ghetto. The rhetoric says: we give at-risk kids cameras so they can show us something of their lives. But the truth is that we — our culture, our society, our species — only want the correct issues to look at. We do not want issues that make us squirm. Like sex and death. How easy is it to censor kids. Especially powerless ones. Pretty easy.
Just yesterday, I cut out scenes of kids shooting dope. The subsequent, disingenuous handwringing would be a waste of my time. Kids with HIV would never shoot drugs, right. People are so stupid. How do you think some of those kids got HIV in the first fucking place. I superimposed Eminem. I am in need of symbols, too. He was a kid-at-risk once. One who was able to transcend those risks through language. Listen to the words. That is what rap is about. Listen to the language. It’s all in there. You might not like what you hear. You might not like what you see. But it’s not about you. You might, indeed, have the power to compel me to take any image you do not approve of down. But I know this. It’s not about you. It’s about kids who have potential but something in the process breaks. They end up in hospices. They end up in prisons. They end up lost. They never understand how they arrived anywhere, they never comprehend where it is they’re going, and they do not fathom why it is they are never able to anticipate any of the serious challenges in their lives. They do not know how to transcend anything let alone themselves. Because they have no internal concept of how they are living their lives. It’s like anything else. For it to work, you have to start learning how to do it early on. You have to know yourself. If we are not allowed to confront the issues that haunt us as human beings, how do we EVER manage to transcend them.
If we can’t so much as look at an image of the issue, how is it that we find answers. Tell me, please. No one ever has and no one ever will because, artist or no artist, art or no art, no one can. It is NOT an issue of protecting children. That is a red herring. It IS an issue of children with a terminal disease confronting how they will live what they have left of TIME. But no. They are not allowed. Like hell, they’re not allowed.
The ten-year-old in this video has a mouth. He’s failing in school. This in spite of the fact that he writes some very heavy rap. Anyone who is writing rap should be turned on by school and the study of language, poetry, and music. But no. The kid’s at-risk. I will go out on a limb here because I know this: One of the things the ten-year-old is at risk for is HIV. Listen to the words about whores, bitches, and trojans. Listen to the ten-year-old rap about his hard cock. Watch the non-verbals when he’s addressing issues like hard drugs. Who has TIME to be shocked. The shock is contrived but the ignorance is only ignorance. Art is how you speak to all of these issues. The ten-year-old is making art. I doubt that it can save him. I am not a hopeful person. I think he will be destroyed. I think he may already be destroyed. Destruction or no destruction, annihilation or no annihilation, school failure or success (he’s never had any), the boy is writing poetry and music.
What did you make today. This boy, this kid from the ghetto and the gutter, is making art, and then he’s singing it for everyone to hear. Show me your life.
David Koloane (Artist, South Africa): Foreword for Real Stories Gallery (June 2010)
More than twenty years ago artists from different cultural and racial backgrounds came together in the capital city of Botswana, Gaborone. They came from within South Africa and outside the country and other far flung metropolis. The occasion was the "Culture And Resistance Conference" in 1982, coordinated by the then banned African National Congress Medu Cultural Ensemble.
The Rallying point of the event was the scourge of the apartheid system of government in South Africa at the time. One of the primary resolutions adopted at the conference was that artistic expression of any kind, should be employed as a weapon in the struggle against apartheid. Black and white artists stood shoulder to shoulder for the first time in the fight against racial discrimination. Apartheid legislation has since been annulled in the statute books.
In celebrating the new dispensation in 1984 with the revered personality of Nelson Mandela at the helm, who could have predicted what lay beyond the horizon after the euphoria of the inauguration of the first democratically elected government in South Africa? A human catastrophe in the form of HIV and AIDS reared its' head decimating whole communities.
The pandemic has been an eerie stigma of silence and shame from within ourselves, our neighbours, peers and societal deficiencies culminating in the gross vulnerability of women and children in our midst. The numerous funerals conducted on a daily basis in the South African townships also reflect the racial and economic divide still prevalent. It was at the funeral of an ex-student of mine where a colleague, who was a close friend of deceased, remarked to me: "Young people today are learning how to die and not how to live." The stories and legends are legion, yet they are only told in whispers and whimpers.
Let us will ourselves against the pandemic with the same urgency and vigour of our fight against apartheid. If we had artists of the world against apartheid, why can't we have artists of the world against AIDS?
Real Stories Gallery is calling for the international community of artists and creative writers to help slow down the rapid spread of HIV within our neighbourhoods around the world. We are invited to express our collective concerns, to share our wisdom and to cross fertilize our ideas. Through our stories we may shift the culture of discrimination towards those affected by the virus.
Together our visual documents on Real Stories Gallery, our collective conscience and desire for social justice, will bring about change; a new culture created by ordinary people who share an ordinary vision - that it is possible today for everyone to have access to lifesaving HIV prevention and health care, to live with dignity and respect.
As an artist who has experienced astonishing changes within the communities surrounding me, I urge you to reach out and look around you with the empathy and reflection of an artist, and return to share your work with us all on Real Stories Gallery.
"Banned" by Gonkar Gyatso (Artist, Tibet; Art For Humanity)
Dr Vishakha N. Desai (President, Asia Society, USA)
Societies express themselves through their art. Throughout history people have turned to the arts to convey their identity and culture, their feelings of tradition and of change, to emphasize what is considered good and to dispel what is bad. Artists are instrumental cultural messengers, reminding us of who we are and who we would like to be.
At Asia Society we believe in connecting people to find solutions to urgent issues and we strive to bring communities together from across the world. Art has always played an important role in achieving our goal. People can introduce themselves and their ideas to each other, creating a climate for conversations that enable a deeper understanding and context for the pressing issues of the day.
One of the urgent issues today is the scourge of HIV/AIDS. AIDS is a disease that affects our physical bodies. Yet, it has also been allowed to scourge through our communities through its' cultural stigma. The stigma associated with HIV and AIDS prevents lifesaving information and treatment from reaching those at risk and most in need.
Real Stories Gallery is bringing together a global community of artists and storytellers, to heal our communities - traumatized by this contemporary catastrophe and is thus seeking to dispel the destructive stigma assigned to HIV and AIDS, so millions of lives can be saved.
I urge you to seize the opportunity afforded today by Real Stories Gallery. Through images and stories, let us come together to break the silence of fear and shame surrounding HIV and AIDS. Through such creativity, we can inspire a new culture in which everyone will be free to receive lifesaving HIV prevention and so that all may live freely with dignity and respect.
(William Cleveland, Founder & Director, Center for the Study of Art and Community)
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