Artists Action Around AIDS/Highly Effective Art (AAAA/HEART)

This programme uses art to give voice to cultural understandings around HIV/AIDS, enhance local conceptualisations of complex biomedical issues around HIV, and provide meaningful opportunities for engaged discussion within and by communities around the pandemic. The programme is particularly concerned with encouraging local community participation, and therefore strives to locate its activities in areas that enable local accessibility.

As part of their activities AAAA develops and curates exhibitions that reflect and mirror the history and challenges particular to HIV/AIDS in South Africa, thereby serving to document the often lost and forgotten human face of HIV/AIDS.

The organisation also gives communities and artists a voice through participatory training workshops. Community artists are encouraged to depict the "physical face" of AIDS and to archive, document, explore, and express the human condition. The languages of the arts are considered effective as they have the ability to cross boundaries of culture, language, literacy, and religious belief. Following the workshops, collaboration may occur between visual artists, the media, performing artists, and educationists to produce projects and campaigns that are able to highlight, for example, the issues and myths surrounding HIV/AIDS.

The project also conducts "train the trainer" workshops which seek to mobilise trained art-workers in utilising their skills for the benefit of infected and affected communities in the fight against HIV/AIDS. It also aims to mentor these art-workers so that they can apply their professional skills to the development of, for example, child-friendly programmes to educate orphans and vulnerable children on issues surrounding HIV/AIDS. The objectives of the workshop process are to:

• develop and extend the expertise of art and child care professionals engaged in creative work with children;
• utilise the skills and experience of art professionals to effectively participate in the fight against HIV/AIDS;
• provide an environment for free personal expression through the medium of various art forms, facilitated by trained personnel;
• provide children with the techniques for artistic reflection and translation into the challenges and complexities surrounding HIV/AIDS; and
• provide a therapeutic experience for children in need and to mobilise community response to HIV/AIDS.

In addition, the project conducts body mapping workshops which focus on youth and adults affected and infected by HIV/AIDS. The project draws participants from diverse communities, in particular from the HIV/AIDS support groups and clinics. According to AAAA/HEART, 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 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 people with AIDS (PWA). 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.

To view a list and short descriptions of core past and ongoing projects, click here.

HIV/AIDS, Children, Youth.

The vision of the AAAA/HEART Programmes is to contribute to the development of a culture of human rights and a better dispensation for communities touched by HIV/AIDS and to magnify the role of the cultural arts and cultural/community responses to the issues and challenges surrounding the HIV pandemic.

HIVAN's primary purpose is to promote, conduct, and build capacity for research that is responsive to, and contributes to alleviating the circumstances of, people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS. By connecting multidisciplinary scholarship with the immediate needs and problems of health-care providers, civil society organisations, and communities, and by making relevant information accessible to them, HIVAN strives to enhance the quality of HIV and AIDS prevention, care and treatment in both the formal and informal public health systems.