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Luv ’til it Hurts is comprised of three acts. For the sake of imagination, let’s call them GAME (Act I), BUSINESS PLAN (Act II), and MARKETIZATION (Act III). For more insight into the acts, see What about Elton?. While there are multiple stakeholders involved across the project’s duration, there will be lead artists engaged for each of the three acts. These artists have been invited to help with specific points for which both design and strategy are essential. Their involvement then gives way to an ‘act’. Egyptian artist Adham Bakry is involved in ACT I. Canadian artist Niki Singleton is involved in ACT II. And Polish artist Jakub Szczęsny is involved in ACT III along with US artists, Eric Rhein and Brad Walrond. ACT II takes the form of a graphic novel, and ACT III includes a traveling group show and a new ‘platform’.

‘Features’ happen when someone engages the LUV project in a dialogue that produces more than one article or installment. The LUV site is a scrapbook (of sorts) for the two-year project. When we have money we pay for content. Sometimes the project takes an editorial stance and interviews an artist, activist and/or organizer working on HIV and stigma in a way that deserves urgent sharing. If you’d like to share a piece of related content, please contact us. If you have an idea for a FEATURE, contact us louder!

The Legendary House of Zion was founded by Icon Pony Zion in Spring of 2007 in NYC. In 2016 Pony Zion was invited to São Paulo by Lanchonete.org for the EXPLODE! Residency, and ATAQUE, the first international ball of its size and public access up until then in São Paulo. After training all week and serving as a judge for ATAQUE, that night Pony named a father and mother to lead the new chapter that had formed, called House of Zion-Brasil. In January 2019, Pony Zion returned to São Paulo to visit with and support the Brasil chapter and perform during the third annual Vera Verão ball that House of Zion-Brasil makes with Coletivo Amem and other partners. 

The project “Humans As Hosts”, by the artist Kairon Liu, began in 2017. Together with social networks, NGOs, and Health Authorities, it recruited HIV-positive individuals to volunteer as participants. Liu conducted in-depth interviews with the individuals, and created fictional images and texts together. The created archives can be seen as the proof/disproof of the stereotypical prejudice and discrimination that are shaped by a collective social values.

Today, medical treatments help people infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) have prolonged and ordinary lives, as well as prevent further transmission, but they can never kill the virus hiding within. Despite these advances, moral condemnation and discrimination against the disease continue. The consequences of this stigma are mental illness and distress, often generating greater suffering than the physiological disease itself. Until a true cure is found, shame, insecurity, and trauma will continue to afflict those diagnosed with HIV until our societies and communities change the ways in which we consider and support them.

The Launch Pad is a randomized series of new stories –some poems, some prose, some both. These works in progress imagine the Launch of Luv ’til It Hurts as a point of departure to consider the prospective, imagined and re-imagined legacies of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in some future time.

Poet, writer, activist, and conceptual artist Brad Walrond maintains Launch Pad as a column charting his growing participation in the Luv ’til it Hurts project over its two-year initial run. He is also the maker of Every Where Alien, a LUV coalition member.

Love Positive Women is a series that began during the 2019 and 2020 Love Positive Women annual holiday Feb 1st - Feb 14th. The project was started by Jessica Whitbread, and uses social media to link local grassroots gestures of love. Using Valentines Day as a backdrop, LPW creates a platform for individuals and communities to engage in public and private acts of love and caring for women living with HIV.

A timeline for Luv ’til it Hurts is comprised of two years and approximately three acts. [See: ACT I, ACT II]

In its present form, Luv ’til it Hurts lasts two years. This timeframe runs (roughly) from its launch at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam (July 2018)* in partnership with Taiwanese artist Kairon Liu and his Humans as Hosts project through July 2020 and the next International AIDS Conferences in Mexico City and San Francisco. The rationale of a timed or ‘durational’ project is discussed in Why Make an Open Work?. In addition to a specific duration, Luv ’til it Hurts also builds up over three acts, milestones that presuppose changes of rhythm along the project’s two-year timeline. Something new or different or un-yet-imagined at the beginning of project will surely follow.

Luv ’til it Hurts will be around approximately two years, and plans to reveal a ‘business plan for fighting stigma’ and supporting urgent HIV work at the end of the period. After which we hope a bigger outfit will pick it up and run with it. This new [support] strategy is the endgame. For now we are a coalition of HIV+ folks and  allies, artists and people from other ‘walks of life’ engaged in a discussion on stigma.