Paper short abstract:

What shape the storytelling process in a collaborative project about HIV? Through a close examination of ‘This is my Face’ (Cabezas Pino, 2019), I examine the tensions and opportunities of collaborative storytelling processes when working with people living with HIV.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine the process of autobiographical HIV storytelling as an active practice of resistance. People living with HIV in Chile define the time of diagnosis as the starting point of a long-term ‘fracture’, in which a revelation about the body takes place through pointing to the presence of a virus that cannot be reversed. If a diagnosis is the starting point of this biographical disruption, the process of learning how to live with HIV is a continuous form of autopoietic storytelling. This is a process in which body, mind and self are intertwined and re-shaped by their ability to narrate themselves in order ‘to articulate and resolve core, universal problems’ and as ‘a way to avoid or heal biographical discontinuities’ (Becker, 1997, p. 25), but more importantly as strategic practice to make sense of what they are going through.

I critically draw on my experiences of working on ´This is my Face: Audio-visual practice as collaborative sense-making among men living with HIV in Chile” to understand the sense-making processes around the biographical disruption caused by HIV and its consequences in how the world is reconfigured. I will examine the implementation of a novel autobiographical audiovisual method, named ‘collaborative mise en Scène’ to suggest that creative storytelling processes respond to a larger array of tensions, strategic interventions and alliances, beyond the ‘I’ and ‘You’ of the inter-subjective encounter.