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HIVe: walking, talking HIV/AIDS, AIDS: Cultures and Histories Festival 2018 Various locations in Shoreditch & The Glory, Kingsland Rd, London Friday 27th July 2018, 5.30-7.30 pm and 9.00-10.00 pm Event description: HIVe-walking, talking HIV/AIDS past, present and future....a HIV/AIDS history walk of Spitalfields & Shoreditch for and by those with memories and histories to share... The walk will start at Bishopsgate Institute and take in Chariots, Gear, Rivington Place, The London Apprentice, Prepster and Mildmay. James Ivory and Conal McStravick will lead an array of amazing participants including pioneering artists and activists, archive materials and representatives from HIV/AIDS organisations past and present to guide us through HIV/AIDS in London and the UK since 1981. A follow-up event at The Glory will feature recent commissions from Visual AIDS, NY and Studio Voltaire, London, placing young LGBTQIA artists Juliet Jacques, the Inflamed Collective and LJ Roberts in dialogue with positive peers, elders and forebears.

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Stuart Marshall: HIV/AIDS on UK screens and AIDS cultural activism in the global pandemic.  Meditations In An Emergency: HIV/AIDS in Film, TV and the Media, BFI Flare, BFI Reuben Library, London, Fri 30th March 2018 Event description: Join us for an afternoon of insightful talks, illustrated presentations and show-and-tells, and rich discussion exploring the relationship between HIV/AIDS in the media- from feature film and TV dramas to news coverage, music videos and beyond. Watch little seen material from the BFI National Archive, see awareness posters from the V&A, share stories and memories, take a long hard look at instant queer classic ‘120 BPM’ and much more. How have representations generated stigma and fear? How has the media served as a vital tool education and made experiences visible? How have LGBTQ+communities used media as a means of protest and activism? What histories do these media representations tell? Join us to explore these questions. With contributions by Zorian Clayton, Joao Florencio, Hannah Kershaw, Ash Kotak, Simon McCallum, Conal McStravick and more.

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Illustration by Michael Leonard for The Joy of Gay Sex by Dr. Charles Silverstein & Edmund White, 1977 (used for the Learning/Public/Moments handout)

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Learning/Public/Moments, Showroom, London, Saturday 3rd February 2018, 4–7pm Event description: In 2017 Conal McStravick, a London-based artist, worked with former Stuart Marshall collaborator Bruce Bayley and artist Adam Saad to develop a series of workshops for young people from Mosaic LGBT Youth Centre. These sought to explore what what is at stake in redrawing queer history, and to explore their own experiences as pathways to queer futures. The workshops aimed to re-contextualise British video artist Stuart Marshall's films like Bright Eyes, and the works that influenced it such as Gay Sweatshop Theatre's As Time Goes By, as works that explore a century of queerness and what repression and liberation really mean to those who identify with the cultural and political making and re-making of LGBTQI community .This public workshop will draw together and re-present highlighted material and workshop activities generated by parallel Learning in a Public Medium events in Belfast and Newcastle, and is an opportunity to re-visit the themes of these workshops, to share collaborative outcomes with others and reflect on some of the problems encountered.This three part event will explore: 1. Responses to Stuart Marshall's Idiophonics (1971) and the queer space of sound, AIDS activism and sound, and postcolonial perspectives on sound, visibility and public protest. (Developed with Circa, Newcastle, AMINI, Belfast, Adam Saad, Bruce Bayley and Mosaic LGBT Youth Group, London and Ferdiansyah Thajib, KUNCI Cultural Centre, Yogyakarta.) 2. The staging of care, self-care and choice in queer and feminist writing and video of the feminist movement, the women's health movement and AIDS activism including works by Stuart Marshall, Jo Spence and Audrey Lorde. (Developed with Dr. Fiona Anderson and BA Fine Art students, Newcastle University Fine Art Department and workshop participants at The Northern Charter, Newcastle.) 3. A 'Potluck Disco' where to the background of moving images of gay and lesbian discos and music and sound drawn from the gay and lesbian archive we will share food, recipes, memories and movements as we discuss how the body archives queer experience. (Developed at Hospitalfield, Arbroath and in conversation with London-based artist Chloe Cooper.) Come with recipes and dance moves to share!

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Other Stories of HIV/AIDS: Culture, History and the Ongoing Epidemic, Showroom, London, 24th August 2017, 10am-7pm Event description: Over the last few years writers, artists, activists, academics and others have been both bearing witness to and working to destabilize and de-centre dominant narratives circulating about the history of HIV/AIDS. At the crux of this work is the fact that too often, AIDS-related histories centralize white, cis male, urban, US-based gay men during the 1980s and 1990s. Lesser known and often overlooked AIDS realities have been unearthed, but they continue to remain largely unknown. Central to the destabilizing process have been three questions: How do we know what we know about the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis? What is being erased, forgotten? And, what has been put in place, created and/or ill-considered in the theorizing, documentation, archiving, and dissemination of the past as it relates to HIV/AIDS? Over an informal, interactive day, participants will gather to speak about their AIDS-related projects, further consider the above questions and continue to build networks of knowledge as related to the past, present and future of HIV/AIDS, queer temporalities and utopian horizons. All welcome for this free event, especially those who are living with HIV, impacted by the ongoing crisis and/or do AIDS-related work, and want to hear what others are doing. Artists, activists, academics, caregivers, performers, writers, and cultural workers are encouraged to attend. The event will be structured in participatory sessions including presentations, small group discussions and regular breaks. The event is organized by Aimar Arriola, Theo Gordon, Theodore (ted) Kerr, Conal McStravick, Jaime Shearn Coan, and Dan Udy, who do work on HIV/AIDS as researchers, writers, artists and curators.

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Learning In A Public Medium/ Mosaic LGBT Youth Group Workshops with Bruce Bayley, Conal McStravick and Adam Saad, Showroom Gallery, London, July/ August 2017.

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Learning in a Public Medium, The Showroom, London, 2016-18 Events description:

Conal McStravick in collaboration with Bruce Bayley, Chloe Cooper and Adam Saad working with Mosaic LGBT Youth Centre and opening Doors London Spring/Summer 2017

This series of workshops will ask what's at stake, in redrawing queer history to explore ways to include our own experiences as pathways to queer futures. The work aims to re-contextualise British video artist Stuart Marshall's idea of a history of the present explored through works like Bright Eyes and the works that influenced it like Gay Sweatshop Theatre's As Time Goes By, as works that explored a century of queerness and what repression and liberation really mean to those who identify with the cultural and political making and re-making of LGBTQI community.

The workshop has been conceived by artist Conal McStravick as part of an ongoing live research project titled Learning in a Public Medium that takes Stuart Marshall's works as the basis of new research and practice for existing and new audiences. For a series of events at The Showroom Conal has invited artists and researchers with shared and intersecting interests in Marshall and his creative context to share their methodologies as ways to enter into new readings and performances that will contribute to performance event at The Showroom Gallery that will bring together parallel UK-wide Learning in a Public Medium activity.

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Documentation from Learning In A Public Medium: ‘If someone can stand up in front of an audience and say it, then they should say it…,’  Stuart Marshall: Alternative medicine, ethics and the archive from the women’s health movement and AIDS activism to the present. The Northern Charter, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Saturday 13th May 2017 4.00-7.00pm

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Learning In A Public Medium: 'If someone can stand up in front of an audience and say it, then they should say it...,’  Stuart Marshall- alternative medicine, ethics and the archive from the women's health movement and AIDS activism to the present. The Northern Charter, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Saturday 13th May 2017 4.00-7.00pm Event description: A screening, reading and performance event with Conal McStravick, Dr. Fiona Anderson, students of Newcastle University Fine Art Department and live audience members.  This live research event will re-stage the materials shared and developed through workshops at Newcastle University followed by a discussion on the ethical and political potential of this material. As well as the works of Stuart Marshall (1949-1993), Kathy Acker (1947-1997), Audrey Lorde (1934-1992), Marlon T. Riggs (1957-1994), and Jo Spence(1934-1992), this workshop echoes Pedagogue the 1988 collaboration between Stuart Marshall and Neil Bartlett that took a collaboration between Marshall, Bartlett and students at Newcastle Polytechnic as the basis of a cultural activist response to Section 28. As a work this addresses the hierarchies and agencies of the pedagogical situation as much as it explores the intersection of feminist, LGBT+ and HIV/AIDS activism(s) to stage interdisciplinary strategies for producing and sharing knowledge as a critique of power.

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Documentation from Learning in a Public Medium: Global faith, queer protest, and video activism in the AIDS crisis and the present, The Lab at MAC Belfast, Saturday 25th March 2017 1-4 PM. (Images courtesy of AMINI)

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Learning in a Public Medium: Global faith, queer protest, and video activism in the AIDS crisis and the present. The Lab at MAC Belfast, Saturday 25th March 2017 1-4 PM. Event description: In 1989, video artist, writer, arts organiser, educator and activist Stuart Marshall wrote:‘the visual domain has an extraordinary importance to gay politics and gay experience. For example, the gay pride march is the only political demonstration which automatically achieves its own political ends. Unlike any other political demonstration which attempts to demonstrate – to make visible – the extent of public disapproval in the hope of an eventual political effect. It demonstrates that lesbians and gay men exist, that we insist on being visible and that we refuse to be confined to the private domain by which we have been consigned by law. The Gay Pride march takes up and makes public the forms of display- carnival theatre, pantomime, ‘exhibitionism’- which have been the only forms through which gay men have been allowed to 'appear’.’ This workshop will explore Stuart Marshall’s writings and works for sound and video that configure queerness, visibility and sound in the context of a reflection on the intersection of faith, activism and protest by comparing queernesses in the context of sectarian conflict and the influence of faith in queer politics and culture in the global north - Northern Ireland- and the global south - Aceh, Indonesia -,to consider what it means to march in a context where marching is already a contested kind of public protest or where queerness leads to corporal punishment or state sanctioned violence and brutality. Acknowledging the role that radical theatre and street performance played in the genesis of pride as a form of political protest, the workshop will also seek to explore movement, spatial exploration and sound as evidenced in Stuart Marshall’s 1971 sound-mapping work titled Idiophonics, that uses the body, sound and language as a way to consider alternative paths of resistance to spatial domination and/ or the visible in this and other queer cultural activist works and practices.  Workshop schedule: Part 1: Movement(s), resistance and bodies Reading from Stuart Marshall, Picturing Deviancy, in Ecstatic Antibodies: Revisiting the AIDS Mythology.(Ed. Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta). Reading and movement exercise using Stuart Marshall’s ‘Go Through The Motions,’ 1975, 6 mins. Clips from ACT UP N.I.H. protests and Stuart Marshall interview with Gregg Bordowitz on Christopher Street, New York from Stuart Marshall’s Over Our Dead Bodies, 1991, 74 mins. Movement exercises with laptops and projectors projecting images of protest, resistance and bodies: Audio from: Keep Your Laws Off My Body, Catherine Gund and Zoe Leonard, 1990, 12 mins Video from:  Elegy in the Streets, Jim Hubbard, 1989, 29 mins (extracts) Journal of the Plague Year (After Daniel Defoe), Stuart Marshall, 1984 (extract) Kiss 25 Goodbye, Steve Farrer, 1991, 6 mins 42 secs Affirmations, Marlon Riggs, 1991, 10 mins (extracts) Screening of Robert Hilferty, Stop the Church, 1991, 23 mins 16 secs -COMFORT BREAK- Part 2: Performance (mapping space in sound, queerly) Reading from Stuart Marshall, Alvin Lucier's Music of Signs in Space, Studio International, 192 # 984. December 1976, p.284. 'Consider how the notion of space has developed in the visual arts since the mid- 1960s. Sculptural articulation of three dimensional space has been supplemented by environmental art, body art, performance space, conceptual space, installation – the list could be enormous. In a sense space can be seen to play no part in music (at least by the composer).  Western music has traditionally demanded a repression of space: most music is performed for an audience who are all in the same seat. To a certain extent musical performance must address itself to the performance space but only to subjugate its specificities – a 'bad' concert hall is one that irrepressibly asserts its own presence. Conductors attempt to de-emphasise the acoustic characteristics of particular auditoriums in order to attain a kind of acoustic norm appropriate to the kind of music being played. This may involve the repositioning of instrumental sections and the moderation of notated dynamics, if for example, he brass section is over-emphasized by the resonance of the space. But this extremely important spatial parameter is un-notated by the composer and in this sense is extra-musical. It falls outside the musical code, Most music is spatially non-specific in notation and spatially assignifying in performance (in that performance aspires to an acoustic norm).' Workshop based on Idiophonics, Stuart Marshall, 1971  Idiophonics, as the title implies, is concerned with the individuality of both performer’s and audience member’s perception and with the signification of these differences. The work has no definitive form—performances are constructed from a repertoire of simple sections. The most recently performed version consisted of three sections: 1. Three performers carrying tuned wood blocks and hammers stand back-to-back in the centre of the performance space. They attempt to make a simultaneous attack by intuiting each other’s moment of entry. When a performer detects simultaneity s/he takes a pre-determined number of steps away from the centre of the space. A series of closely spaced pulses, even though they may occur within a single pulse’s reverberation time, do not constitute simultaneity. As masking must be total, errors may occur when two simultaneous pulses are thought to be three. As the performers separate within the space the environmental acoustics begin to alter individual performer’s perception of simultaneities. As the distance between performers increases to more than 57’ audible delays are formed by the sounds traveling for more than 50 ms. These delays markedly affect an individual performer’s perception as sounds heard simultaneously by one performer cannot be heard as such by any other performer. The section is completed when performers reach the extremities of the performance space. 2. Three performers tune ultrasonic whistles having a low frequency range within the acoustic spectrum to the lowest frequency available on all three whistles. The performers separate to the two furthest points of the performance space, A and B at one point, C at the other. Performers A and C produce a continuous tone as A walks rapidly toward C. C hears A’s frequency shifted upwards by a doppler effect and tunes his/her whistle to this frequency. C carries this new frequency (which is heard as a downwards doppler effect by A) to B who repeats the operation. Each audience member hears a frequency shift differently depending upon his/her position in relation to the moving performer. The operation is continued until the whistle frequencies are carried out of performers’ range of perception. 3. Three performers carrying portable foghorns stand at three exits from the performance space. Each in turn produces a sound pulse which is immediately “echoed” by the other two. The performers than leave the auditorium producing pulse sounds at will. When a performer hears a signal s/he replies immediately. As sound delays increase, returning replies may sound like new signals which have been returned as echoes from distant buildings or landforms. The section finishes when performers can no longer maintain audio The group will attempt a queer Idiophonics (using found objects we can gather and/or mobile phones e.g. youtube clips of air horns, app notifications, recordings of phobic slurs or embodied queer sounds of choice while following Marshall’s original instructions…) Part 3: Questions and discussion Questions developed by Ferdiansyah Thajib, KUNCI Cultural Studies Centre, Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Conal McStravick on queer protest and faith in the post-colonial present.  Questions: What kinds of public are created through current forms of street politics? How do these relate to historical forms of street protest? What can (queer) protesters aim to represent by protesting and how can they address the complicated relation between rights and imperialism or colonialism? What are the continuities, or discontinuities the limits and possibilities of comparing different types of protest or march in Northern Ireland or in Aceh, Indonesia? What role does the audible play in protest and in terms of tooling for new kinds of protest, what are the roles of the audible in pushing visibility?  Who do queers represent when they protest and whose voices do they conjure in their acts of protest? Whose outrage needs to be voiced ? How are these protests personal and how are they relational and how are they shared?   

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Library Live(s) zine (produced by Ryan Conrad, Kevin O’Neill and Conal McStravick, for Library Live(s) ICA Mediatheque event at ICA London, Saturday 18th March 2017, 7-9pm. Excerpt from Ryan’s questions for Conal/ Conal’s questions for Ryan. C: What does the ICA Mediatheque Video Library mean to you and what does it mean to reconfigure the video library queerly?

R: The ICA Video Library is another store house of minoritarian historical breadcrumbs. Although I don’t have a personal or physical connection to this collection and its history being in Canada, it serves as another reminder of where one can find another history. Queers are indeed everywhere, but we are in some places more than others and the ICA Video Library archives are certainly a place where we have been thanks to people like Stuart Marshall. C: What do you think of the role that trauma plays in the so-called queer archive? What additional emotional states or shared life events could potentially figure in the queer archive and what role does the moving image and performance play in staging and re-staging these?  R: The circumstantial link between the growing availability of consumer grade film and video equipment and the rise in identity-based movements couldn’t be clearer to me. The homophile movements of the 1950s and 60s coincides with the release of 8mm and Super8mm film, the gay liberation movements and the explosion of gay porn in the 1970s coincides with the mass market success of the VCR, and the 1980s and 1990s saw ever increasing options in digital video like the camcorder. The fact that newly accessible tools to produce DIY videotapes with an emphasis on self-representation came about at the same time that the AIDS crisis has marked queer identities as particularly linked to historical trauma. So to say that queer archives are punctuated by trauma is simply to acknowledge the historical conditions of queer life at a time when moving images were being added to the historical record.  C: Must queer art and activism think across temporal, geographical, political and aesthetic boundaries? And if so, why is this important in challenging LGBTQIA political narratives at the present time in particular? R: If queer art or activism is to be relevant or useful, and not simply in the neoliberal sense of having monetized use value, it must engage critically with an intersectional lens that is historically and geographically situated. Most mainstream gay and lesbian politics are emphatically uncritical and single-issue unfortunately. 

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Learning In A Public Medium: Library Live(s), a screening and participatory performance with Conal McStravick & Ryan Conrad (appearing via Skype) for ICA London’s Mediatheque exhibition, Saturday 18th March 2017, 7-9pm. Featuring works by: Vincent Chevalier, Rhys Ernst, Richard Fung, Emma Hart, Mike Hoolboom, Inflamed Collective, Ron Peck, Signe Pierce & Ali Coates, Lisa Steele, AL Steiner, Takoma Active Collection & Chris Vargas. An annotation exercise of ‘Artist’s Tapes’ Stuart Marshall’s 1986 ICA video catalogue essay and a participatory performance titled ‘Scars of Your Choice’ (after Lisa Steele’s ‘Birthday Suit With Scars and Defects,’ 1974 & Alison Knowles’ ‘Shoes of your choice,’ 1963.)

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Meet Stuart Marshall/ Learning In A Public Medium poster (courtesy of Concordia University/ HIV AIDS Community Lecture Series) for World AIDS Day lecture 1st December 2016.

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A retrospective screening of Stuart Marshall’s works on HIV/AIDS at Concordia University to tie-in with “Meet Stuart Marshall - Art, Activism, and the AIDS Crisis/ Learning in a Public Medium,” World AIDS Day, Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium, MBAM (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) on Thursday 1st Dec 2016, World AIDS Day. 

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"Meet Stuart Marshall - Art, Activism, and the AIDS Crisis/ Learning in a Public Medium," World AIDS Day, Thursday 1st Dec 2016, Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium, MBAM (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) The presentation looks at Stuart Marshall’s video and television work on HIV/AIDS in the context of retrospective screenings of these works and Generations, an exhibition of Stuart Marshall’s ‘Robert Marshall’ (1991) and Concordia BA Fine Art works that respond to HIV/AIDS.