WEDNESDAY 3 NOVember 18:00 - 20:30

YUJI KAWASHIMA

Can everything really be found in books? Which archives create an epidemic? Do the editorial process and an epidemic last the same length of time? Does the death of bodies mean the death of books? Which (other) bibliographies allow us to read about the impact of HIV/Aids on art history? During this talk I will discuss the project “Burning the Archive: Stories, Images and Documents in a Seropositive Library” that, in collaboration with the UCM Fine Arts Faculty Library, aims to revise and enrich library collections that promote works of fiction built around the HIV/Aids pandemic in art history (particularly, those created outside the Euro-American context). Besides proposing the acquisition of a curated selection of publications, the project also has an editorial dimension, as “Burning the Archive” is a collaborative publication too, bringing together articles written by specialists on the topic from such countries as Spain, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. If the story has not yet finished and the Aids pandemic is not yet over, how can we restore the memory and value of those artistic expressions and life trajectories that do not fill extensive volumes of work but are, rather, more like margin notes on a page?

Yuji Kawasima has a PhD in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid. Since 2019, he has coordinated the postgraduate programmes at the Reina Sofía Museum Study Centre. He works in the fields of research, curation, cultural management, teaching and art criticism, with particular interest in practices linked with gender and queer studies in the context of Latin America.