The show must go on

The Show Must Go On

Centre Cultural La Nau / Universitat de València / 2025
museum design

VAL/CAS/ENG

“The Show Must Go On” is a journey through the history of HIV and 35 years of activism by the Valencia Citizens' Anti-AIDS Committee, a collective founded in 1989 to support the most vulnerable people and combat stigma in a context of fear and misinformation. Through artworks, documents, testimonies, and cultural materials, the exhibition reconstructs a narrative of collective resistance, medical advances, and community building, highlighting the role of art as a tool for visibility and social change.

The museum design takes its conceptual reference from the work of the New York-based collective Group Material. It proposes a temporal cartography in an installation format that brings together art objects, other types of cultural artifacts, and manufactured objects with the intention of mapping the relationship between art and complex socio-political dynamics active since 1980, composing the material in a non-hierarchical manner. Thus, the narrative of the strength of the struggle lies in the unity of the whole.

To organize the content, the geometry of the exhibition space is used to divide it into two timelines: one related to the local context (the struggle of the Citizens' Anti-AIDS Committee) and the other to the global context. These timelines, displayed in different colors, establish a chronological rhythm in the gallery, organizing all the material in a way that is easily identifiable for the visitor. The alignment of the texts in two different directions follows the chronological reading path and smoothly guides the reader through time.

Curators
Pilar Devesa, Ramón Espacio, Pepe Miralles (ComitéVLC)

Graphic Design and exhibition codesign
Marta Negre

Coordination from the Center
Alba Braza

Photographs
Ricardo Ruíz