Love, Simeon is a motion-picture performance that conjures a portal to Simeon – a rhesus macaque in a primate testing facility. Love, Simeon will be part of the show Crip’d Ecologies: Unfurling Expanded Environments, at Root Divison in San Francisco. The motion-picture performance and imagined cinema workshop which will take place during the exhibition’s closing weekend March 10, 3:30-4:30pm.
You can listen to the audio trailer for Love, Simeon above. Special thanks to Jesse Vasquez for imaging together, to Rachel Smith, Mercedes Villalba and Julian Gatto for sounding together, to Isa Leal for dancing together, to Stephanie Maroney, Praba Pilar, moira williams, and the Hypha Collective for fermenting together, and to all the microbes, mice, monkeys, and humans who have labored to keep me alive.
As an ecosexual living with HIV, my entry point into this dense knot centers the story of those simians who have been laboring to find a prevention/cure for this deadly virus. In cinematic dreams and seances, Simeon tells the story of SHIV – a chimeric construct created in a laboratory, so that a panacea might be found. The fact that HIV-related pharmaceuticals signal the difference between life and death for me, forces me grapple with this moment of cognitive dissonance, beyond simple articulations of inter-species ethics and accountability. It forces me to ask: how might I bear witness to the lives of those who make it possible for me to live and love and lust?
I begin with the simple act of finding ways to speak and image with simians in HIV testing facilities, so that their lives are not doubly silenced in our normalization of these charged human-simian relations. What comes next, once I have borne witness, what kinds of alter-practices might we imagine from this encounter at the abyss, remains to be seen.
Anuj Vaidya 