Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS

How do we reckon with an AIDS past when there is still an AIDS present? What role do archives and archivists play in supporting more just, liberatory AIDS futures? These are some of the questions addressed in Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS by Marika Cifor, assistant professor in the Information School and adjunct faculty member in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Cifor's research interests lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines, including information science and archival studies, gender studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. Viral Cultures traces the efforts of archivists, curators, and activists in documenting AIDS activism over time; Cifor is interested in uncovering how communities marginalized by race, sexuality, gender, and HIV status both represent themselves and are represented within the archives. Her book may be one of the first to specifically take AIDS archives into account in understanding the impact of AIDS activism from the 1980s to today.

Published in the midst of the ongoing deadly COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed 6.87 million people globally as of March 2023,¹Viral Cultures raises relevant and pressing issues for the archival profession. Cifor draws our attention to “‘activist archiving,' the archival care activists do as part of their efforts to engender social change, and . . . ‘archiving activism,' public and private archival institutions' collecting, maintenance, use, and mediations of records created by AIDS activists” (p. 5). She examines how AIDS archives, which primarily document the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s to the early 1990s, came to be produced and preserved. She also explores how community stakeholders, artists, and activists in the twenty-first century are engaging with AIDS archives as they seek to disrupt widespread complacency and inaction in the face of an ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Cifor focuses on three distinct repositories that have employed a targeted approach to building large-scale AIDS-related collections over the years: the New York Public Library (NYPL), which houses the AIDS Activist Video Collection and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) archive; New York University's (NYU) Fales Library and Special Collections, which collects materials related to AIDS activism as part of its Downtown Collection; and Visual AIDS, a community archives organization that maintains the Artist+ Registry documenting the work of artists living with HIV/AIDS. Cifor notes that while New York was and is central to the story of AIDS, it is not the only or “arguably even the most important place in telling the story of HIV/AIDS in America,” nor is it the only location with significant AIDS archives (p. 21). She selected these institutions because they prioritize HIV/AIDS in their collection development, appraisal, and acquisition processes; are dedicated to making HIV/AIDS records accessible; and contain “some of the most significant collections in scale and scope on HIV/AIDS activism during the 1980s and early 1990s” (p. 18).

Cifor's choice to exclusively examine New York–based repositories arguably represents a limitation of the work, as it is not clear whether these repositories represent AIDS archives writ large. Given the ways in which ACT UP in particular tends to dominate cultural memories and representations of AIDS, amplifying these specific collections runs the risk of reifying some of the same perceptions of AIDS that other activists have challenged—mainly that AIDS was and is experienced primarily as a sexually transmitted disease impacting queer communities, with gay white men being the face of the crisis and its activist response. Cifor does point to the work of contemporary white and BIPOC artist-activists such as Jess Mac, Kia LaBeija, and Demian DinéYazhi as revealing a “disidentification both within and against the dominant gay, white, middle-class, cismale-centric discourses through which queer and trans people are called to identify with AIDS and its activism now” (pp. 195–96). But Cifor's focus on specific kinds of AIDS archives and AIDS activists overlooks the fact that intravenous drug users and other communities (e.g., those who are incarcerated, are experiencing poverty, or are undocumented) who are at high risk of contracting HIV/AIDS in the present tend to be missing from these archives. Clearly, Cifor's primary focus is in understanding how particular LGBTQ activist communities, including ACT UP New York, create and interact with AIDS records over time.

Cifor uses archival ethnography—a kind of qualitative field research that combines observation of archival environments, semistructured interviews, document analysis, and archival research—to describe her research methods. Her work is informed by a feminist ethics of care approach, which understands archival work as care work. Elsewhere, Cifor and Michelle Caswell argue that in a “feminist ethics of care approach, archivists are understood and understand themselves as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility based on radical empathy.”² Cifor begins by introducing readers to one of the central analytic concepts animating the book, vital nostalgia, which she uses to refer to “a generative process for interrogating, addressing, and repairing structural power inequities grounded in the bittersweet longing for a past time or space” (p. 6). The book's five chapters each center on one or more cases based on Cifor's ethnographic data. While each chapter is thematically distinct, they build upon each other in ways that work toward a coherent whole, and readers will encounter themes, concepts, and examples from Cifor's three chosen repositories at multiple points throughout the book.

Viral Cultures demonstrates some of the ways in which the archiving and curation of AIDS records can function as care work. Cifor examines the archival needs that drove ACT UP's documentation efforts from the beginning; not only were the members of ACT UP, the most publicly visible face of 1980s- and 1990s-era AIDS activism, intimately aware of how political power could be wielded through media representation, they also recognized that archiving preserved evidence that could be used to demand a public response, an essential tactic in the fight to save their own lives. Cifor argues that the active curation of archival records functioned as a form of cure in remediating the acute trauma and marginalization experienced by those with HIV/AIDS; in this, she uses the example of the Visual AIDS Archive Project, a community-based archives that has documented and preserved the work of artists living with HIV/AIDs since 1994. Cifor encourages readers to consider the ways in which activist archivists working with and within community organizations allow us to reconceptualize archival work as “curative” and an essential component in making “HIV/AIDS livable, as a bodily and cultural experience that . . . exceeds the bounds of medical cure” (p. 113).

Cifor's work also examines AIDS archival production and activation through a temporal lens, which is useful for considering the social and political impact of mobilizing archival records through vehicles such as art projects, public exhibitions, workshops, and protest and activism in analog and digital spaces. She distinguishes between epidemic time and endemic time; the former is defined as the 1981–1996 period characterized by almost categorical death from AIDS, while the latter refers to everything after the 1996 discovery of antiretroviral therapies that have helped ensure long-term HIV survivability for those privileged with access. Epidemic time was marked by a sense of urgency when anti-AIDS activists demanded an immediate response to an imminent crisis. Endemic time is characterized by the assurance that there is no immediate threat to the public and thus no need to continue investing in and supporting those marginalized bodies who are still experiencing a very real pandemic—including cisgender and transgender women; Black, brown, Indigenous, and undocumented people; and individuals experiencing poverty, homelessness, or incarceration. For many white, able-bodied, cisgender Americans, AIDS is encountered and experienced primarily through archival records or commemorations framed retrospectively as remembrance of an event that is comfortably contained in the past, or in epidemic time (pp. 11–12). Viral Cultures reminds us that the AIDS crisis is still with us, even if it no longer occupies a central position in social and political discourses.

The ongoing AIDS pandemic makes the stakes of building, maintaining, and representing AIDS archives through exhibitions and other public-facing works extremely high. It also calls archivists, curators, artists, and activists to consider how these archives can be activated in the present through art, community organizing, and critical memorializing. Viral Cultures contributes to a larger ongoing discourse within the archival field that critiques traditional notions of archives as neutral, static by-products of institutional functions, with archivists serving as passive, object custodians of the historical record. At every turn, Cifor suggests a more thoughtful and engaged role for archivists and repositories. Within the context of AIDS archives, stewards of these records should be active “players in [the] conversations . . . [about the] historicization of AIDS and nostalgia for its activism” (p. 67). She proposes that this activism should occur through contextualizing records that are increasingly at risk of commodification and decontextualization through online circulation, collaborating with the communities whose activism records institutions hold, and encouraging the creative and open use of archival records and spaces in contemporary movement work.

Archivists would do well to attend to Cifor's discussion of the fraught relationship between some AIDS activist communities and traditional repositories, in this case with the NYPL, which eventually acquired ACT UP's records. Processing backlogs, inadequate or inaccurate description, and other issues fueled distrust within the communities documented in these collections and led to the perception that their records were inaccessible or not well cared for. This dynamic is likely familiar to many archivists in institutions across the United States, and activist interventions and institutional experimentation have both been necessary to begin to resolve it. Under the leadership of NYPL staff in the 2010s, the library began to consciously engage in a “political project” to unite the AIDS activist community with their records and to make these communities feel “at home” in the library (p. 97). Cifor's book provides ample discussion of the ways archival repositories can continue to perpetuate or begin to remediate harmful practices that disconnect activists and their records.

Cifor addresses this last point when she examines the ways in which contemporary artists are manipulating and circulating iconic objects of nostalgia from AIDS archives online. She describes three different artists who utilize digital platforms to construct, reimagine, and disseminate AIDS archives in creative, critical ways. Thus, Viral Cultures extends our understanding of the social and political lives of AIDS archives by tracing how the language and aesthetics registered in prominent AIDS archives permeate digital cultures based on the desire to “go viral” (p. 195). Cifor makes the case that digital technologies and the digital circulation of AIDS records is fundamentally changing how we access and engage with AIDS archives. It is important to understand how artists and other users of archival records are participating in building their own archives beyond the confines of mainstream repositories. In the story of AIDS archives, the impact of the digital can hardly be understated, although Cifor does not fully grapple with the implications of this for archival praxis. It would have been compelling to see how the repositories Cifor examines, including the NYPL and NYU's Fales Library, are engaging in building digital and web archives of AIDS activism records in the present moment. The book contains little discussion of the challenges grassroots digital archives might face in terms of sustainability and maintenance, as well as the ethical issues at stake in preserving and describing AIDS-related digital records.

In all, Viral Cultures is compelling reading for archivists and anyone interested in activist archiving, archiving activism, community archives, and the intersections between these and digital cultures and spaces. Cifor's writing at times suffers from sheer density and verbosity, which can impact the text's overall clarity. This requires some close and careful reading on the part of the audience. The book is unquestionably an academic monograph, and the prose presents a more traditional academic style that may be inaccessible or difficult to parse for non-scholarly audiences. Cifor is careful, however, to define critical terminology as needed to better support her arguments. She also does an excellent job of using repetition and signposting to clearly scaffold the overall organization of the book and the main arguments, ideas, and topics within each chapter. Readers looking for these main ideas will benefit from the introductory and concluding sections in each chapter, as well as the introduction and epilogue of the book. These sections clearly summarize her overarching critical approaches, terminology, arguments, and sources of evidence.

The book's themes also particularly resonate in 2023 in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Just as AIDS continues to be a crisis for many marginalized and vulnerable people, the trajectory of COVID-19 is that of an ongoing crisis whose impacts will be increasingly distributed unevenly. In our current pandemic moment, what do archivists gain from a fuller understanding of AIDS archives over time? What aspects of “normal” need to change to accommodate upheavals and new ways of being in the world? The representational power of archives to narrate past, present, and future understandings of crises cannot be understated, and it is important for archivists to consider their role in what is intrinsically a political process of meaning-making. While certainly not a how-to manual by any means, this book offers some compelling and candid examples and observations from curators, archivists, and institutions who incorporated activist archiving frameworks and an ethics of care into archival work in concrete ways, whether through proactive selection and appraisal, offering library space for critical community dialogue and protest, or simply being open to building relationships and trust with community stakeholders.

Viral Cultures honors the efforts of activist archivists and artists who built and continue to build archives as forms of respite, healing, and resistance for marginalized communities, even as it critiques the power dynamics and inequalities reflected within the AIDS activist movement and its documentation efforts. The book is also a call to arms for curators, archivists, and traditional archival repositories to activate pandemic records toward liberatory and social justice ends, both now and in the future.