The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt is an irreplaceable piece of social history
Homotopia 2018 is almost upon us, folks.
It's a double whammy this year as Homotopia celebrates its 15th anniversary and World AIDS Day, its thirtieth. What better way to celebrate than to honour both?
The theme of this year's festival is I Will Survive – hold your wigs, Gloria Gaynor fans – and a new panel for the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt has been commissioned.
The new quilt panel designed by artist Liz Sherbourne
In the words of Homotopia, the memorial quilt is "an irreplaceable piece of social history.
"Through specially decorated panels, it tells the stories of many of those lost in the early days of the HIV AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s."
The panel, designed by local artist, Liz Sherbourne, will be displayed in all its glory on Saturday 24 November 2018 at the Museum Of Liverpool on Pier Head. Accompanying the quilt will be a special screening of the documentary After 82.
If you're not free on the 24 November, don't fret, it'll also be on display on 1 December at St George's Hall, Liverpool, as part of the Sahir House World AIDS Day Vigil.
Sherbourne's panel will be joined together with seven other panels, also produced in Merseyside, to create one quilt and it'll then be admitted to the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt catalogue.
Sherbourne describes the panel as, "Three main figures, inspired directly from the Now & Then oral history project which saw Merseyside people affected by HIV share their stories from the past three decades.
"The hearts are a direct reference to the 1992 Love & Passion campaign to celebrate changing attitudes to HIV."
For more information on Homotopia Festival 2018, visit www.homotopia.net. For more on the quilt click here.
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