How are the history and present of the epidemic entangled with colonial violence? Jorge Bordello’s THIS IS NOT A CURE brings a critique of unequal access to HIV treatment into public space. Madi Awadalla’s lecture-performance Where Does Your AIDS Come From? explores epidemic origin myths and the bodies caught in between. The DJ set by Mad Kate attunes to how sound carries histories of power and resistance.

The night begins at 18:00 with Jorge Bordello’s THIS IS NOT A CURE, a performance critiquing unequal access to HIV treatment. Living with HIV, Bordello takes an ART pill and writes again and again, “This is not a cure,” until the chalk is spent and the boards are filled. Reciting economic data tied to antiretrovirals, he exposes a paradox: these drugs sustain life but offer no cure, revealing the everyday realities of HIV, the profit-driven structures of the pharmaceutical industry, and the gap between medical progress and social justice. Chalk’s fragility and erasure embody the ongoing struggle for a true cure.

Madi Awadalla’s „Where Does Your AIDS Come From?“ is a lecture performance on epidemic origin myths, colonial afterlives, and the bodies caught in between. Framed as a personal and political excavation, it weaves medical archives, migration interviews, and intimate encounters to probe a deceptively simple question often posed to people living with HIV: How did you get it? Writer and transdisciplinary artist Ahmed „Madi“ Awadalla works across performance, storytelling, and writing to engage public health, sexual politics, displacement, and the afterlives of colonialism.

From 20:30, Mad Kate’s DJ set attunes to how sound carries histories of power and resistance. Mad Kate is not a self made person; there are many shes, hes, theys inside of them, making them, recreating them. They are dedicated to staying with the struggles which are borne through and out of lived experiences on their own body and staying with complicated alleyships which are not. Mad Kate believes that queer is not just who we fck, how we dress and how we drag but how we resolve conflict, position our bodies, show up as allies, language our desires and co-regulate with our environments. The process of queering runs through their carework, heartwork, and artwork.