(sero)TROPICAL(e)  

These serve as atypical and performative selfportraits of me in relation to being diagnosed with HIV. And in the earlier stages of its detection, also recounts my struggle with AIDS-related complications in early 2015. (sero)TROPICAL(e) explores my link with the tropics as an off-white homosexual male with mixed ethnicity encompassing topographies and ecologies pertaining to my queerness, which I find inexorably linked to nature. At one hand, it comes through bold gestures on decolonizing nature and in the process aesthetics nestled within the tropes of tropicality as an active site of resistance. On another, it also serves as visual metaphors for my malady and seeking the answers in nature and in the process seeking further elsewheres about my condition and position.

http://visualaids.org/artists/detail/gian-cruz