Recapitulating by Jennifer Hillhouse
Most obviously, Recapitulating is Inspired by Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin’s 2013 poster “Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me!” and its critique of the commodification of AIDS activism in the 80s. Recapitulating confronts the same generational rift that Marika exposes in their examination of discussions between generations of activists but through the lens of biased archival data (Marika, 37). Instead of the onus being placed on how we interpret and yearn for a certain history, as Lucas Hilderbrand coins nostalgic longing for ACT UP as “retro activism” (Hilderbrand, 303), Recapitulating asks us to pitch farther back into the archive and demand better representation from its contents. Can we confront the specters of racism, bigotry, transphobia, and homophobia that lie within? Has nostalgia moved so far past that we don’t see a point in waking them from their musty paper graves? Is it better to let sleeping dogs lie?
Recapitulating is a poster that intentionally fails to have a subject. But it didn’t start out that way. To demonstrate the dehumanizing way data can reduce queer lives to numeric codes, I initially wanted to merge features of queer persons present in the 1981-1986 archives during Canada’s AIDS crisis with data gathered and created by Public Health and ACT UP. However, while making Recapitulating I realized the act of digital splicing and grafting allegorically performed the same mutilation of queer persons as the healthcare data I was critiquing did.
Instead of pretending visual ownership of queer persons during the 1980s AIDS crisis, Recapitulating acknowledges its failure to truly know them–and consequently, to accurately present them. As such, queer bodies are represented by a variety of featureless green and blue figures. They roam, frolic, and perform a spectrum of tableaus guided by their own narratives. And yet, we can’t make sense of their lives: a tennis player serves to a giant hand, a man runs from a samurai and a giant, and a ballerina tries to pet a horse. Their lives are confusing, disjointed, untimely, and unknowable to the viewer. Recapitulating visually fails in the same way the archive on data from Public Health and ACT UP do: it can’t tell a cohesive story of a persons’ life no matter the amount of embodied data points it adds.
One thing that the frolicking featureless figures occlude from the view is their skin tone, nationality, and culture: they cannot be easily classified by the eye into races. By hiding this from us, they conflict with the “conventional narrative” Viviane Namaste describes (Namaste, 132). Namaste argues how the medical experiences of AIDS positive Montreal diasporic Haitians were eclipsed “by white gay men with access to healthcare in the United States” whose experiences “were extrapolated to define the disease more broadly” (Namaste, 136). We can see traces of that conventional narrative on the wall of the room in Recapitulating, as “Canadian, Haitian, or Other” were categories of nationalities in 1986 public health data for AIDS positive individuals. Thus, by spatially contrasting the medical bias of the archive with figures who refuse its classifications, Recapitulating encourages the reader to think of rich lives beyond the experiences purporting themselves in the tables.
Cifor, Marika. Viral Cultures : Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. ProQuest, Ebook Central. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=6985006.
Namaste, Viviane. AIDS Histories Other Wise: The Case of Haitians in Montreal. Apr. 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478009269-006.