Eugenio Echeverría

Almanaque-fotográfica is pleased to invite you to Antimonumento Crico by Eugenio Echeverría (Barcelona), curated by Arturo Delgado (Mexico City), consisting of an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) experience within an exhibition device.

The script for Antimonumento Crico is Eugenio Echeverría's personal approach to the crystal consumption crisis in the gay men's community based on his own experience.

The experience, developed for more than a year in VR and 3D programs, does not seek an academic or historicist approach. On the contrary, this artistic project is a sum of reflections that Eugenio Echeverría raises, based on his drug use for more than 25 years, which is intertwined with his research as an activist, curator and artist on sex- dissidence, HIV-AIDS, and drugs, especially in Centro Cultural Border that he founded in 2006 which is today an activism agency.

The experience unfolds in interactive levels, like a video game, and goes through certain systematic attacks on homosexuals, such as the Spanish inquisition, the Nazi holocaust and the AIDS crisis, until reaching a journey that correlates the events with the current epidemic glass, associated with chemsex.

Antimonumento Crico questions the relationship between systemic violence against sex-dissident bodies, addictions, and the construction of gay identity through sex-affective ties. Through this immersive production, the viewer will experience a fascinating, reflective and disturbing 360o fiction.

Accessible through Oculus Quest II virtual reality headset available in the gallery, visitors can also enjoy and collect a special edition of fine art photo, posters and merch with images taken from Antimonumento Crico.

It is a project to which collaborators have joined, since it was presented at the Tamayo, the UN Queer HIV-AIDS Conference and the Digital Art Fair Hong Kong and like all independent artF, lioswpeorssibdlie otnwlyicean: d thanks to the independent press, the public and collectors who keep contemporary art alivLeeitnteMrexico. The exhibition program includes a series of talks and special events throughout the 2-month duratioCnroisftothbealeAxhscibeinticoino, which concludes on Saturday, January 14, 2023.

Sometimes I am afraid of insults, beatings, bullying, exclusion, my own homophobia, bipolarity, of killing myself with drugs, isolation or growing old alone... I am afraid of not recognizing the oppression in our history, forgetting that Others have existed before me. And when I do, I prefer to believe that our history begins with the gay liberation movements of the 70's and preach "love-is-love" but it is not real. Homosexuals have suffered executions, forced disappearances, gallows, the electric chair, concentration camps, police raids, conversion therapies, prisons, hospitals, pandemics and junkie epidemics. Our struggles go back centuries but we have not clearly identified the pain of our ancestors. We can barely embrace our recent wounds. The impact of the AIDS crisis on a generation of gays plagued by death affected our way of experiencing love and sexuality. Can this be understood as a collective trauma? Is it related to current crystal consumption and group chemsex practices?

I started taking drugs when I was 13 years old and since then I had not experienced a junkie crisis as complex as the one we are experiencing today as a community of gay and bisexual men with crystal. I have found myself in situations where I ask myself, what are we looking for beyond the hint, the slam, the sex, the pleasure, the high? And there is no answer, just ideas that we share with each other. We coincide in experiences, processes and searches.

These experiences around the use of crystal open radical and violent disruptive spaces, with a fierce potential for death, transcendence and understanding. If you stay too much... you rot. How to get out? Paradoxically, they are spaces full of solidarity and intimacy. They are complicated trips but because of how we are taking drugs, what we do and with whom we do it, I realize that its purpose cannot be only individual, it is also collective. It cannot be only playful, it is also a search for the transcendental.

There are crises that separate and others that unite, and after two years sharing with other cricos, other artists and activists, I realize that this is one of those that unite. There are many of us who are living it this way. We just needed to talk and listen.

— Eugenio Echeverría