VIRAL INTIMACIES launches with an evening of performances: In Why are you so negative?, Naya de Souza (aka Bundaskanzlerin) delivers a sharp critique of German politics and society, while the performance duo Los Amarillos (Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta) highlights global inequalities in access to HIV medication. Federica Dauri’s long durational performance LIMEN explores the threshold where symbolic and real boundaries meet.

Federica Dauri is a performance artist, choreographer and visual artist. For Viral Intimacies, Dauri presents LIMEN “threshold”, a long-durational performance which invokes a space of passage.
Unfolding within a sculptural environment of barbed wire and the artist’s naked body, moving with extreme slowness, precision and care, where every gesture negotiates sharp boundaries, slipping above and below, searching for passages where risk and possibility meet. The barbed wire becomes a metaphor for control, censorship, repression, and systemic regulation of intimacy, mobility and access to care. This threshold mirrors the exhibition’s concerns: a space in-between where intimacy, memory, and relationally circulate quietly yet powerfully to create a porous space where vulnerability, courage, exposure, and care coexist, allowing audiences to trace their own paths through what is revealed, suggested or left unfinished.

Los Amarillos, founded by Santiago Lemus and Camilo Acosta, two openly gay, HIV-positive visual artists, emerged from the short film Los Amarillos for Visual AIDS NYC’s Being & Belonging (22). Using voice, body, and audiovisual art, the collective explores health, stigma, and life with HIV through poetic imagery, performance, and collective actions. Manifiesto Amarillo extends this work, enacting 30 political-poetic images that question stigma, the role of art institutions, and the place of dissident bodies. Like daily medication, words are moistened and swallowed, carrying demand, the sacred, nostalgia, and utopia.

Naya de Souza works under different alter-egos like “LUX VENÉREA”, “Bundaskanzlerin,” transitioning between disciplines such as performance art, comedy/stand-up, and cooking. Multilingual by birth and transdisciplinary by heritage, Naya’s body of work transcends traditional boundaries, whether between disciplines, countries, or institutions. She views art as a perpetual process of immigration and translation. Her online Bundaskanzlerin serves as a social media critique of Germany’s exclusionary political/art world, utilizing found footage, video collages, photography and memes.