Tristan’s Moon is an illuminated contemporary sculpture smashed daily with adrenalin-pumped poetry spilling through photocollage lens, chased by gangs of video mashups each sewn tightly, loosely, tightly, with hair bristles dripping saturated images into images in images on images. Stories glued with fountain pens scribble in a rumble of lightening that calls for our skies to squeeze, hard, so our sons may dance in rain. So  their stories may writhe and hiss at the moonless destruction woven perfectly with the coyness of our communities' embarrassment, and cruelty. So they may pound and massage the sweetness of each lovers breath, as they scurry along corridors moulded from their neighbours excrement and gorge on forbidden names.  So their uncensored witness may caress  her eyes over and over, until she agrees with a mother's heartbeats that no one's son should ever be forced to open HIV's purest gift, or be made to reach for medications just there, just beyond, his grasp.

Tristan’s Moon speaks of one boy who yearned to live whilst he was dying. 

Tristan's Moon is created in a space of safety away from censorship and within collaborative friendship born of witness that fiercely challenges capture and judgment of a boy who belonged to no one.

Tim Barrus/ Tristan’s Moon: The Sculpture

I stand amazed to read about how other people see Tristan’s Moon, the sculpture. Even when they have not seen it. Even though they have not seen it, they’re always ready to pass judgement as to what something is. Because that is all they know how to do.

Put the thing into a box. Give it a name we all know. Then, it must be the thing.

They associate me with writing so the project must be a book, and even if the cover passes for what is sculpture (a ceramic), the rest of it has to be a book, right.

No. Wrong.

You do not know me. You do not get me even a little bit.

Tristan’s Moon is a sculpture. All of it. The whole thing.

As a book, you think you can paw through it, you’re literate, right, read the narrative and come away from the experience maybe with some kind of literary understanding.

You can’t read Tristan’s Moon. You can’t even paw through it. For one thing, the design is such so that the book cannot be closed.

The book is open.

Even death will not close this book. Especially death. Will not close this book. Why.

Because the book will not be closed.

The sculpture is crammed with symbols, stories, dialogues, photography, and painting. All of these things were things we lived.

You cannot know them.

You do not know the code. There is no way for you to learn it.

And I am glad.

The code was something I could only share with Tristan. You cannot even guess at what it means. As a sculpture, Tristan’s Moon reaches way, way beyond the limited reach of your authority. To define. Even then (nervously), you would insist that Tristan’s Moon is a book.

Go ahead. Insist all you want. You didn’t live it. You didn’t make it. And you didn’t die with it.

The thing weighs about fifteen pounds now and I am not even at the stage where I do the ceramics that will be the cover.

Layer after layer. Depth after depth. The thing fairly screams at you with life.

It is not my job to explain shit to you.

Tristan’s Moon is a sculpture. You will be able to see some small piece of it from a distance.

You’re on Delos. It’s midnight. The sea is bibleblack and all around you. The lights of Mykonos glittering.

You are not seeing the mystery of ruins.

You are looking up.

Cinematheque Films: Les Garçons de Cinémathèque

Tim Barrus, visual poet/photographer/videoartist, founded Cinémathèque Films; a  residential art program that serves as a 24/7 safe house protection for male adolescents with HIV/AIDS, who are also at risk for psychological, neurological, and developmental disabilities due to sexual abuse, gang violence, addiction, human trafficking, and cyclical prostitution. The boys are reached and educated through painting, music, photography, video, film, dance, poetry, mentoring, and intensive counseling.

The idea of a safe house is fundamentally based on the dynamics of protection from what brought them here. Witnesses of a time and of a place. While the boys are very connected to the outside world through the interactive use of technology, their contact with that world is monitored in such as way as to prevent contact and/or relationships with abusers, pedophiles, and people from their past who would harm them. The boys are encouraged to utilize such features as banning within the context of social networks. Communications with the boys that are deemed as sexual invites will be banned immediately. Stalking, either physical or electronic, will not be tolerated and is specifically prohibited by EU law. Stalking is defined by us as seeking contact with boys who have either banned people or have requested that they be left alone. Any subsequent attempt to either arrange to physically meet a boy or continue electronic communication is reported to EU authorities. Attempts to communicate with the boys that involve asking them questions about their personal lives, histories, relationships, legal status, physical whereabouts, private email addresses, or sexual preferences are regarded as stalking and will be dealt with accordingly.

We are a SAFE environment where boys at risk learn to empower themselves through the self-actualization and educational modalities of art. Cinémathèque Films: Arts Education: Students are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation in photographic, video and film production. Representations and facsimiles posted here are presented as teaching tools and instruments employed to instruct students in the techniques and application of mixed media art and collage. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows art-teaching entities the fair use of such materials in classroom and teaching-research applications. Please Note: No Boys are harmed by Tim Barrus during the creation and re-creation of Cinematheque’s work.

painrelief boy - the morphine hour

maelstrom - sustiva dreams

Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot”

Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come —

We took a kid from traffickers. He did not belong to them.

The story of human trafficking has not been told.

You do not believe it.

To you, human trafficking is just another issue.  Another cause.  Just another crime.

One that is allowed to function with impunity.

my next painting project is a canvas that is 4’ long and 2’ high/ i am calling it hiv tsunami/ will look like a seascape/ big wave crashing in/ no people/ just an earthshaking monstrous wave/ am working on it today outside/  — t

"Net Curtains" by Tim Barrus

"don't let the neighbours know"

Nan Golding

Tristan's Moon

Real Stories Gallery, 36 Laight Street, New York, NY 10013, USA

Contact: http://realstoriesgallery@gmail.com

**Real Stories Gallery Foundation is a registered 501c charity in the USA

Our friends are pitching in to help us set up Tristan's Moon. The Gallery provides a safe home for a collaborative Art Installation; significant contemporary portraiture exploring the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The installation has been created from photographic collages, videoART films, tattooART, fineART prints and poetry.

Tristan's Moon sculpture book, a collaborative piece  filled with photographs/paintings/poetry created by Tim and Tristan and Art For Humanity's international Fine Art  Print & Poetry portfolios - Break the Silence and Women for Children - will also be housed in Tristan's Moon.

We very much look forward to welcoming you to our collaborative art installation.

Tim Barrus (Founder, Cinematheque Films; Artistic Director, Show Me Your Life)

Tristan is no longer with us. He wanted very much to show us his life. But that life only had a limited run. Tristan was a sex worker. It defined him. But it also killed him. He was young. The tricks (seemingly straight men most of whom had families and children Tristan’s age) like their boys young. Such boys are exploited, abused, addicted, forced into sexual situations they are not equipped to handle, bought and paid for, trafficked, fucked in the mouth, fucked in the ass, torn apart, denied a childhood, frequently murdered, at high risk for HIV infection, denied access to an education, kicked out of schools, kicked out of families, incarcerated in institutions where they are raped, forced to turn to survival sex, and when they’re sick, they turn to the only family they have: other sex workers, junkies, pimps, and drug dealers.

Many commit suicide. For some, HIV/AIDS is suicide. Video is only a representation. It can take many forms. Just a Whore is the shadow of a life. It is not a life. Tristan wanted people to know something about the anguish he had endured. I cannot say I have captured the heart and soul of that. What I can say is that if any part of this video disturbs you, Tristan would have gone for that jugular as well. He did it every day. I went out of my way to tone this down. To make it palatable for you. Tristan was infamous in his small circle of boywhores. Men on the street, and men on the metro used to stare at him. “Come on, let’s run,” he’d say. “All I’m known for is getting fucked.”

If I could change anything, I would change that. He was more than a rare object men could pay to have sex with. He was a kid. Like any other kid. He had dreams and ambition and he was smart. Smart enough to survive living on his own in a very adult, abusive environment. How many videos have to be made before we can admit that there are children our culture just throws away like trash.

“We love our children.”

I am told this particular piece of dog shit every day. What you love is a compliant image of who and what you think you can make obedient and manage. Children are human beings. They have thoughts. They have feelings. They’re trying to make sense of the world around them. They have very few rights. “But we love our children.”

I just don’t believe a word of it. And either did Tristan. 

Tristan was one of the first Cinematheque boys; an exceptionally gifted child who touched and influenced the lives of those around him.  Cinematheque is a 24/7 safe house and intensive visual arts program for Boys with HIV/AIDS, founded by the notorious and acclaimed visual artist and guerilla poet Tim Barrus.

Tim Barrus 

They tell me not to sell off pieces of the past, but the past is nothing I can hang on to because that is not who I am.

I want the past to propel us into the future.

Right here, right now.

And right here, right now, Tristan’s Moon is for sale.

This is what Tristan would have wanted.

“Sell my stuff,” he’d say.

And he would not hesitate to say it.

Buy Tristan’s Moon and propel dozens of at risk kids who live at the edges of existence through the experience of showing the rest of us their lives.

Show Me Your Life

HIV nightsweats soak the bedsheets

Show Me Your Life is an international video/art program where kids at-risk, street kids, HIV-infected homeless children, minors doing sex work, children addicted to glue, displaced children in war zones and refugee camps, and children with pediatric AIDS receiving no medical treatment, are given video cameras and asked to share their stories and their lives. The video camera, smaller than the palm of a hand, is now a voice.

Traditionally, it's been the documentary filmmaker who has created narratives about children living such a marginal existence. The term professional photographer has never meant these children. This is the first time such children have been given the technology, the video camera, and asked to film their own lives from their unique perspective. Only they can show you how they see it.

Participating children will be paired with peer mentors, who have already left the street. The peer mentors help shape the video and at the same time, they teach other kids how to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end where the end cannot be known, but is implied that getting off the street is always a possibility. Sex worker peers who have left that life are reaching out to other children exploited by the international sex industry with the message that leaving sex work can be done. It requires courage and an alternative place where children can be safe. Their witness raises the level of awareness that HIV infection and human trafficking are endemically linked.

Children who live in situations where HIV is not being treated are coming forward with visual evidence of their struggle, to survive in a landscape where adult supervision means institutional warehousing, rape, and debilitating physical violence.  Children who live in conflict-situations where they are fleeing their homes because their families have been murdered by soldiers, are coming forward with images of being on the run. Children who are addicted to sniffing glue to keep the hunger out, and the cold away, are filming images of the kids around them with serious neurological impairment, sniffing glue and dying. Runaways are portraying a life of being pursued by police who arrest them, beat them, and incarcerate them in institutions more violent than the streets from which they were pulled out of.

Children dying from AIDS are not always "brave," and even in their fear of death are creating a documentation that says: we were here. Technology has changed the world and the world of the child at-risk is no exception. Yet technology is rarely available to these children. Show Me Your Life changes that. We give the kid the tools. We do not dictate how his story is to be told. Our job is to instruct and listen.

There are no statistics that estimate the numbers of male children who live such lives. When sex trafficking is discussed, it is always with females in mind, as well it should be. But there are boys in this organized crime equation. Boys whose stories have never been told.

Today I invite you to join us from around the world, to let these boys know that we care.  Let us harness the power of our humanity and our enormous capacity for creativity, to mobilize our imaginations and weave together a vision that each of our 192 United Nations Member Countries will move to ratify and enforce, The Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the significant optional protocols: The Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict and The Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.  Until our perception of the problem is inclusive enough to embrace the male of the species -- whether he lives in a brothel or a refugee camp -- we will never get close to what is really happening.
 
As Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu shared in his Foreword for Real Stories Gallery: Our friends around the world will share in our joy, as together we stand up for the principals of universal dignity and fellowship, and influence our thoughts and actions towards our kin.  What a wonderful gift we will create for our children and our grandchildren. We will be able to look at them in the eye and proudly declare our legacy of freedom to them, and to the world. Show Me Your Life is a small collection of small voices. But hearing them, and seeing where they really live, gives the painting of this picture of the tip of an iceberg a hard dose of super-heated reality whose compelling need for change cannot be denied.   

writing, dancing death in tunnels/ if you are a poet with aids forget about being published/ there isn’t an editor alive who will even look at your work/ you will be regarded with extraordinary contempt/ i am not and never have been a team player/ i’ve tried and failed a thousand times/ this is tolerated or not tolerated to varying extents in different places/ i want to take poetry and make it dance/ you will not be seen as a poet/ you will be a poet with aids/ pathos is a problem/

I am afraid of losing my mind.  I want something no one is allowed to have.

I want the mad ones.  The children mad enough to struggle and survive.  I want the children who have seen war.  The children mad enough to question everything.  The children who have had everything taken away from them.  The children who are broken and mad enough to attempt to repair themselves.  The children mad enough to spit and fight.  Mad enough to laugh outrageously.  Mad enough to make a music of their own.  Mad enough to see themselves as individuals. I want children who will dance in rain.  I want the mad crazy ones.  I want the ones insane enough to love hard, and brave enough to be vulnerable.

I do not know where this story begins.

I am haunted by deep, electric flashes of music, memory, dragons and madness.