Fluidos discontinuos [Discontinuous Fluids]: Resistances and Variations in Desire in Jesús Martínez Oliva’s Work on HIV/AIDS

Abstract

This text tries to analyze the corpus of Jesús Martínez Oliva about HIV/AIDS, a work that chronologically belongs to the first half of the 1990s. Although the artist’s work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic is not extensive, nor comparable in quantity to that produced by some of his contemporaries, it has nonetheless become a key reference for studies on the visual arts and the HIV crisis in Spain. This paper takes as its starting point the exhibition Fluidos discontinuos (1994), presented at the Fundació Miró, since this installation synthesizes the artist’s position toward HIV. First, it proposes a stance grounded in the continuation of living and desiring; second, it reflects on what sex had become following the introduction of the condom as a technology of prevention. From this perspective, Martínez Oliva examined the new mechanics and the physical and symbolic changes that emerged from the practice of safe sex. The text is structured in three sections, mirroring the construction of Fluidos discontinuos, which consisted of three pieces. Through them, it addresses interrupted energies, the adaptation of sexual practices during the HIV crisis, and the “dildification” of the other. This perspective departs from approaches centered on death, mourning, or protest—more common in representations of the subject—in order to focus instead on a form of resistance grounded in the persistence of desire.