Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS

Despite widespread acknowledgment of the importance of AIDS activism in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, Marika Cifor’s book is the first to investigate the archives upon which such projects depend. Viral Cultures introduces archives as a key facet of HIV/AIDS activism and cultural production. Through archival ethnography, Cifor provides an account of the central players, ideologies, and technologies that have created, sustained, and animated AIDS archives from major exhibitions to Facebook walls and Tumblr pages.

In this talk, Cifor explores how vital nostalgia is a generative practice for engaging with cultural heritage amidst crises. She focuses on the work of Visual AIDS, a community-based arts organisation that, since 1994, has documented and made accessible the records of artists living with HIV and estates of artists who have perished. The holistic cure Visual AIDS demands is requisite to responding in kind to an epidemic that is and always has been political, cultural, and biomedical. Cifor demonstrates how the ways we access and engage with AIDS archives shapes not just the past, but possible presents and futures and the distribution of life chances within them.

About Marika Cifor

Marika Cifor, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Information School and adjunct faculty in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. Her research investigates how individuals and communities marginalised by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV status are represented, and how they document and represent themselves in archives and digital cultures. Cifor is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and her publications on archives, affect, and queer activism appear in information studies, science and technology studies and media studies.

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