Artists’ Action for Long-Life - Mind, Body, Memory Maps

In August, a HIVAN hosted a workshop in the Drama Department of Natal University’s Durban campus. It focused on a range of creative voices from communities and local educational institutions, commemorating, celebrating, challenging and committing themselves to a campaign for Artists' Action Around AIDS.

The participants shared information, explored, interacted and applied their minds to the topics of myth, gender and children in relation to HIV/AIDS.

The Long-Life “Mind, Body, Memory Maps” is a project involving HIV-positive women from Khayelitsha in Cape Town, who produced 12 large paintings of themselves as decorated body outlines. The women have used these unusual life-drawings, along with Memory-Box exercises and daily writings, to record their memories of pain and loss and to help them heal the wounds of “mind, body and memory”.

Three of these activist-artists, Nondumiso Hlwele, Bulelwa Nokwe and Babalwa Cekiso, attended the AAAA workshop and gave a wonderful presentation on their work. The paintings were also displayed at the Durban Art Gallery for the month of August.
The Long-Life Project is co-facilitated by Medicins Sans Frontieres, UCT's Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR), Otherwise Media and Jane Solomon. For more information, contact:

Jonathan Morgan
AIDS and Society Research Unit, Centre for Social Science Research
University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch 7701
Tel: (021) 650 4656
Fax: (021) 650 4657
E-mail: jmorgan@commerce.uct.ac.za

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