Artists' Action Around AIDS - Acknowledging, commemorating, celebrating, challenging and committing

A workshop focusing on creative approaches to the themes of myth, gender and children launched HIVAN's campaign dedicated to Artists' Action Around AIDS.

Held on 4th August 2003 in the Drama Department on the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Durban campus, and facilitated by well-known Durban art curator and project manager Bren Brophy, the programme offered postgraduate participants from a variety of creative disciplines and local educational institutions a day of information, exploration, interaction and application.

The welcome address was given by HIVAN's Director of Social and Behavioural Science, Professor Eleanor Preston-Whyte. This was followed with a presentation by the University's Head of Anthropology, Professor Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, on the rationalist versus the "non-rational" approach to illness and the effect of mythological themes on unconscious and conscious behaviour around HIV/AIDS - which established the context for and framework of the Workshop itself as the programme moved through a range of theoretical and informative demonstrations to an afternoon of practical creative and reflective experiences.(A report on Professor Leclerc-Madlala's presentation can be accessed on the righthand side of this page)

The second session featured a presentation given by three HIV-positive women from Khayelitsha in Cape Town who are participant artists in a collaborative project co-facilitated by Medicins Sans Frontieres, UCT's Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR), Otherwise Media and Jane Solomon. This phased action research project uses powerfully expressive and innovative tools including memory boxes, personal journals or memory book-work, verbal, written and illustrated contributions to an advocacy publication called "Long Life", and the painting of body maps.

Noreen Ramsden, author, artist and a veteran activist for children's rights, then presented on artmaking as a therapeutic option for traumatised children, and demonstrated the indicators in children's art that signify cognitive development and emotional states. She also spoke about the rights of children to have access to both creative, personal art for healing and growth and to activist artmaking skills, so as to strengthen children's voices in the process of social change.

The group moved into a studio setting, where actors and puppeteers Mpume Nthombeni and Kasaren Pillay of the Madcaps Creative Theatre Company performed an awesome rendition of "Amagama Amathatu", a drama workshopped, produced and directed by Gisele Turner and Wendy Nell. Pegged on the interactive line "HIV - let's face it" which drew the audience into the performance at pivotal points in the drama, the script embraced and articulated real-life scenarios, personalities and issues surrounding, underlying and driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South African communities.

After lunch, the participant gathering moved into two smaller groups for creative activities. One focused on mask-work, with role-play "behind the masks", while the other engaged in printmaking of "paper prayers". The afternoon closed with an informal, but no less stirring, performance-presentation by internationally acclaimed ?“actor-vist?” Pieter-Dirk Uys, offering his reflections on HIV/AIDS, his own prevention campaign road-show, sex and sexuality, fear, humour, instinctive responses and human choices.

All in all, with the HIV/AIDS epidemic touching individual and communal lives in so many different but forceful ways, the workshop group left with a deeper sense of how their contributions, whether artistic or purely humanistic, can inform a more hopeful and healed future.

For more information on HIVAN's 'Artists' Action Around AIDS' Campaign, please click on the hyperlink on the righthand side of this page