Day With(out) Art: Meet Us Where We’re At

The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2025 by presenting Meet Us Where We’re At, a program of six newly commissioned short videos that forefront the experiences of drug users and harm reduction practices around the world as they intersect with the ongoing HIV crisis.

Harm reduction has long been central to the AIDS movement through resources like needle exchange and safe injection sites. Meet Us Where We’re At amplifies the voices of drug users as authors of their own stories and essential participants in the global response to HIV through videos that document the visible world of drugs, as well as the private, often hidden spaces where safety is found. Rooted in the philosophy of meeting people in their personal reality without judgment, the program affirms the full context of drug use—its pleasures, its risks, and its role in how people survive, care, and connect.

Meet Us Where We’re At features videos by Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria), Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam), Gustavo Vinagre and Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal), Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil), Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany), and José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico).

The ICA will also include a special screening of Marlon Riggs’ 1993 documentary Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret) (38 min.), featuring activist and poet Assotto Saint, whose archives inspired the current ICA exhibition Ayida.

Visual AIDS is a New York-based nonprofit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV-positive artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. Day With(out) Art is an annual international day of action and mourning in response to AIDS.

*Note: This program contains mature content. Viewer discretion is advised.

Video Synopses
Voices of Resilience, Kenneth Idongesit Usoro

Voices of Resilience follows the lives of queer individuals and drug users living with HIV in Nigeria. Through personal interviews and experimental visual storytelling, the film shows the protagonists’ worlds as they seek out underground harm reduction services.

The Sister’s Journey, Hoàng Thái Anh

Through a documentary style, The Sister’s Journey explores the daily life of a transgender woman in Vietnam using drugs. The film delves into her fear of stigma, the struggles she faces, and the vital role of harm reduction services and healthcare available to her.

The passion according to G.H.B., Gustavo Vinagre and Vinicius Couto

In the magical realist film The passion according to G.H.B., a gay man reminisces about his orgy days and chem sex, and considers his future while speaking with an apparition of G.H., a canonical fictional character of Brazilian literature.

Realce (Highlight), Camilo Tapia Flores

Realce is a documentary short following two HIV-positive friends, DJ Deseo and porn actor Fernando Brutto, during one of their performances at Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival. The duo move through the streets of Rio and Carnival “blocos,” sharing their reflections on friendship, undetectability, their relationship with sex, and drug use within their own community.

Ghost in the Park, Camila Flores-Fernández

Ghost in the Park traces the narratives of the community of Görlitzer Park, an area in Berlin known for public drug use and trade. Highlighting “drug consumption buses” that promote safer use and aim to reduce HIV transmission among drug users, the space of the bus is taken as an axis through which the experiences and feelings of the community around the park are amplified.

¿Por qué tanto dolor? (Why so much pain?), José Luis Cortés

Instead of asking, “Why so much meth in the gay community?,” Cortés’s experimental film provokes the deeper question, “Why so much pain?” The film delves into the emotional and social wounds that fuel addiction and risk-taking behaviors.

Non, je ne regrette rien (No Regret) (1993, 38 mins.), Marlon Riggs

Through music, poetry, and courageous self-disclosure, five HIV-positive gay Black men (among them poet and performance artist Assotto Saint) discuss their individual confrontations with AIDS, illuminating their journeys through the fear, shame, and stigma that accompanied the disease at the height of the epidemic toward healing, acceptance, and truth. In Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret), director Marlon Riggs tells stories of self-transformation in which a once unmentionable “affliction” is forged into a tool of personal and communal empowerment.