HEART Body Mapping Participatory Art Making Workshop

HIVAN invites interested participants to join the HEART programme team for a five day Body Mapping art making workshop. The workshop will take place 20 ?– 24 March 2006. The closing date for applications is 28 February 2006.

Background to the HEART programme

The HEART programme has evolved since the inception in 2003 of the Artists?’ Action Around AIDS Campaign - this in response to the needs of communities and the emerging capacity of visual arts workers. The programme now encompasses art-related campaigns, commemorative and other exhibitions, a variety of developmental participatory workshops and educational fora.

HEART reflects the need for efficacy within the visual arts arena ?– the direct beneficiaries are communities infected and affected by HIV and AIDS.

Highly Effective Art focuses on interventions that bridge the divide between the social and biomedical aspects of HIV/AIDS and contribute to public awareness and the empowerment of affected and infected communities.

The programme has diversified to include community based participatory workshops that use art making as a vehicle for human rights advocacy and expression as well as providing a tool for the transferral of new knowledge and skills, particularly as concerns treatment literacy and wellness management.

What is Body Mapping?

Body maps are life-sized, mixed media art works created by persons infected with HIV, they depict self/body portraits that gave voice to the participants lives and provide a platform for treatment literacy and human rights education.

A humanistic view of the world suggests that knowledge and understanding must be acquired by engaging with a world of meaning, values and emotions. Experiential art-making engages these faculties and awakens growth potential that is healing, commemorative and life-affirming. Integration of body and mind, acceptance, forgiveness, loss and grief are archetypal human progressions not unfamiliar to the language of art - sight; hearing; thought; memories; ideas; beliefs; attitudes; touch; smell; taste; feelings and dreams.

In general, participants will engage with cultural arts workers, care-givers and artists from diverse backgrounds. This shared experience and the transferral of skills, strategies and knowledge will serve to both capacitate participants within their existing activities and provide mechanisms for strengthening activities within participants?’ home/focus communities.

The programme will also encourage respect for cultural diversity, and promote awareness and understanding. The promotion of local cultures and facilitation of cultural exchange are critical areas of enquiry and application/intervention in the challenges surrounding the pandemic. Central to issues of stigma, discrimination, advocacy and access to human rights are the wide range of culturally specific responses and understandings (as well as misunderstandings) that underpin the treatment, care and support of communities living with HIV/AIDS. By choosing to address cultural and social factors of the disease, the project will disseminate new knowledge and build understanding and awareness through meaningful cultural and artistic exchange.

A common theme in the elements depicted in previous body mapping workshops was the alienation of participants from the medical aspects of their treatments. Patient driven health management requires an understanding of the often complicated bio-medical factors at work in the body, and the body maps are a vehicle that bridges the divide between the medical and social indicators of a disease that is rooted in social (sexual) activity and bio-medical in origin.

These complex human stories constitute a history that is being lost more often than it is recorded.

Body mapping has the potential to intervene on many levels:

• Personal: Body mapping is primarily a tool of personal growth, healing and expression.
• Public awareness: Exhibiting or otherwise publishing the body maps provides a window into a world of experience that nurtures respect, dignity and understanding.
• Political advocacy: The stories ?‘told?’ by body maps reflect and lobby issues surrounding treatment, policy, and law. They provide powerful statements of the successes and failures of political will and access to human rights.
• Therapeutic: Creative challenges and self-expression are one aspect of the body mapping process, ?‘ownership?’ of often misunderstood and mysterious (bio-medial) treatments and the functioning of the body also generate self worth and positive approaches to health psychology.
• Educational: Body mapping requires the transfer of knowledge, for the participant, the mentor artist and for the viewer. Health, nutrition, virology, immunology, and narrative history are explored with creativity and imagination.
• Research: Body maps give subjective expression to the bio-medical aspects of PLWHA. By definition the maps also provide a physical (visual) expression of ideas, memories, feelings and emotions that speak directly to the experiences of the artists/subjects. The maps are a valuable heuristic tool, which serves to mirror the relationships between medical and social researchers, which in turn determines the effectiveness of multi disciplinary intent.


The vision of the Highly Effective Art programme is to contribute to the development of a culture of human rights and a better dispensation for communities touched by HIV and AIDS.

Please do not hesitate to contact Bren or Eliza should you have any queries.

Eliza Moodley / Bren Brophy -Highly Effective Art Programme, Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking (HIVAN), University of KwaZulu-Natal, Public Affairs Annex, 232 King George V Avenue, Durban 4041. Tel: +27 (0)31 260 3334; Fax: +27 (0)31 260 2013; Email: [email protected] or [email protected].