Disclosure Cookbook is a collective culinary experience whose goal is to bring HIV positive people together over a lavish, collectively prepared meal and engage in conversations about disclosure of one’s HIV status. Selecting seasonal ingredients, developing a multi-course menu and developing recipes in the days beforehand, facilitators Jordan Arseneault and Mikiki invite participants to join us in preparing a collective meal, engaged with and respectful of the inevitable food sensitivities and realities of our participants. The dinner preparation serves as the canvas for a discussion around how members of this community navigate HIV disclosure and stigma. We invite participants to plan to be with us for 4-5 hours, so as to enjoy the main course which will be served 90 minutes before the end of the workshop, with clean-up and wrap-up managed by the artists and assistants.
 

Why HIV disclosure? Canada is one of the top three countries with the highest rate of prosecuting HIV positive people for not disclosing their HIV status to sexual partners. Even though the prevention benefits of this misapplication of the law have been widely contested (See Alison Duke’s Positive Women: Exposing Injustice, 2013, and Consent, 2015, or the UNAIDS policy brief on the subject in May, 2013), HIV non-disclosure laws continue to hover like a sword of Damocles over people living with HIV. As articulated by artist and activist Jessica Whitbread of AIDS ACTION NOW! Toronto’s poster/virus series, “You’re only one vindictive lover away from being put in prison.” In this context, creating environments where a stigmatized group can discuss the affect and effects of disclosing (and not disclosing) is of both political and aesthetic importance. Our aim in Disclosure Project is to “make a mess worth making,” as cultural critic Nato Thompson said in his essay on the subject of socially engaged art. In the vein of “Food Landscapes”, “Open Jar” and the concept of making art “outside the citadel”, Disclosure Cookbook activates moments, conversations, and narratives that are outside of the purview of commodification. But, as a nod to the inevitable commodification or “ab/use” of these representations, the outcome of our culinary experiences are a series of photos where quotes from participants statements about disclosure are superimposed onto “food porn” style photographs of the gourmet meals we will prepare. The images, like many of us living with HIV, seduce the viewer, but then must challenge their assumptions about us with hard truths. As HIV positive artists working from a politicized ethic, Mikiki and Arseneault wave the banner “Yes art! Yes therapy! Not art therapy!” in our approach to this project, which is to say that its production, treatment, and ephemeral nature make it strongly part of a social practice artistic tradition, and not as a form of community outreach whose ends are merely palliative. We believe these conversations and their respectful documentation - with lavish cuisine - is part of the art of living as biopolitically engaged and immunosuppressed people.