RÈPLICA. TOUR DE FORCE 2021

Viruses mutate, alter and replicate. Their structure keeps updating as they adapt in response to threats. A virus is an invisible and abstract sign.¹ An epidemic of signification² that circulates among our bodies. A narrative that is gradually resignified, warning us that the idea of an immune world is just an impossible fiction.

It is five years since Joan Morey (Mallorca, 1972) presented his TOUR DE FORCE project in the exhibition 1000 m² of Desire. Architecture and Sexuality at the CCCB (Barcelona Contemporary Culture Centre). TOUR DE FORCE was a site-specific performance for a small audience held in the Pati de les Dones courtyard and the Mirador at the CCCB and inside five limousines which, in the manner of moving stages, took five routes through the city of Barcelona.

TOUR DE FORCE was conceived as a project on the history of HIV/AIDS and its connection with the city, the public space, the social and cultural context in which the disease is passed on, from its cataloguing and conversion into a pandemic in the late 1980s to all those questions that arose out of this state of crisis, a new order of control of bodies, desires and sexualities that introduced new technological devices deployed to govern our lives.

RÈPLICA. TOUR DE FORCE reminds us, like this intruder, that “between myself and me there has always been a gap of space-time; but now there is the opening of an incision and an immune system at odds with itself, forever at cross purposes, irreconcilable.”³ A new abnormality subjugated and under surveillance.

Jesús Alcaide, curator of the exhibition

1 Lebovici, Élisabeth. Sida, transl. Cristina Zelich. Barcelona: Arcàdia (et al. collection), 2020.

2 Treichler, Paula A. "AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification," October, vol. 43, 1987, AIDS: Cultural Analysis,/Cultural Activism (Winter, 1987), pp. 31-70. Published by MIT Press.

3 Nancy, Jean-Luc and Susan Hanson, "L'intrus". The New Centennial Review, vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1-14. Published by Michigan State University Press.