Camden People’s Theatre’s SPRINT Festival returns with a packed programme throughout March. London’s “best-established carnival of new and unusual theatre” features artists with bold ideas, artists who don’t play by the rules, and artists, in many instances, making their first professional work.
This is the fifth of a series of interviews highlighting artists and work within the Festival, as I chat with Diego Agurto about his show, El Gran Varón. Diego is the creator of the Living Museum of HIV Collective, an artistic community project working with emotional archives, testimony, and performance in collaboration with Latin American migrants living with HIV in London.
El Gran Varón is part of the Infecciosa trilogy— a politically charged verbatim performance directed by Chilean artist Diego Agurto Beroiza and performed by Mexican actor Eduardo Arcelus and and Chilean actress, Emilia Cadenasso. It is based on real, anonymous testimonies from Latin American migrants living with HIV in Europe.
Using documentary material, black humour, and pop culture, the piece exposes the violence, exclusion, and surveillance faced by racialised bodies from the Global South. It dismantles colonial structures embedded in health, migration, and desire, positioning performance as an act of insubordination rather than representation. Delivered in multiple languages and with direct address, the work challenges stigma and institutional narratives, refusing to offer healing or visibility—instead, it seeks disobedience and collective reflection.
Distinctive for its use of real archives and verbatim testimonies, El Gran Varón is compelling in its urgency and its refusal to conform.
Where: Camden People’s Theatre.
When: 4 Mar, 7.15pm.
Ticket link: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/El-Gran-Varon
Your verbatim performance, El Gran Varón, is showing at SPRINT as a work-in-progress. What can you tell us about it?
El Gran Varón emerges from two fundamental personal concerns. The first relates to seropositive memories in a world where the experience of HIV has long been dominated by medical discourse, social stigma and cultural narratives saturated with misinformation and moral judgement. I am interested in asking: how can we tell personal stories of HIV while articulating a collective memory of survival, resistance and struggle, but also of care, community and desire?
The second concern relates to the creative processes of theatre itself. I am interested in shifting the focus away from authorial writing towards the verbal materiality of testimony. How do we approach these narratives through their own protagonists? How do we place the stage at the service of their voices, rather than transforming them into raw material for fiction?
This work in progress is a practical exploration of those questions. It draws on testimonies, interviews and archival materials that I have gathered through my research as the creator of the Living Museum of HIV collective, and seeks to experiment with theatrical forms that preserve the ethical and political density of these voices.
How did the trilogy develop, and how did you come to develop some of the themes in this new show?
The trilogy is currently in development and proposes an exploration from three distinct perspectives.
The first is local, situated in Chile, my country of residence. It is titled El Beso de Rock Hudson and will premiere in June at the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral in Santiago, funded by the Chilean Ministry of Culture, the Arts and Heritage. This piece engages with HIV memory within the Chilean context.
The second work is El Gran Varón, which focuses on migration and the experience of Latin Americans living with HIV in London.
The third, still in progress, centres on the seropositive body: a choreographic and performance-based investigation into bodies, their migrations, displacements and stillness.
In El Gran Varón, I revisited materials collected during my Master’s research, which led to the creation of the Living Museum of HIV. Through that process, I have collaborated with Goldsmiths, Positive East, Metro Charity, IRMO, and with individuals who chose to share testimonies of living with the virus in London. From this revisiting emerged questions, metaphors, tensions, desires, loves and fears — above all, a profound nostalgia for origin and for care — and from this affective and political fabric we shaped the staging.
Can you explain some of the themes within El Gran Varón and how they demonstrate Latin American perspectives on HIV?
El Gran Varón engages with several themes that emerge from the experiences of Latin Americans living with HIV in migratory contexts.
The first is the fear of discrimination following diagnosis. For many people from Latin American backgrounds, HIV remains deeply associated with shame, moral judgement and social stigma. A diagnosis is not simply a medical condition; it is an event that can reorganise one’s identity, sense of belonging and relationship to the body.
A second central theme is the family. Latin American cultures are often structured around strong, extended family networks — almost clan-like in their intensity. This can become a powerful space of care and support, but it can also be a site of silence, rejection or exclusion. The piece explores this ambivalence: the family as refuge and as boundary.
A third axis concerns access to treatment. In several Latin American countries, due to geopolitical pressures, economic instability, external debt, or insufficient HIV-related legislation, access to treatment is not always immediate, universal, or inclusive of the latest medication. This reality shapes migratory trajectories in profound ways, as access to healthcare can become a structural reason for displacement.
Finally, the work also addresses tensions within the British context. While the NHS represents a strong public health system, some testimonies speak of experiences of discrimination, lack of culturally sensitive support, misinformation, or insufficient emotional accompaniment. The intersection of migration status, language, race and HIV status can create additional layers of vulnerability.
Taken together, the piece suggests that Latin American perspectives on HIV cannot be separated from colonial histories, economic inequality, family structures and migratory movement. HIV does not appear as an isolated medical condition, but as a point of intersection between body, territory and memory.
You use archival and verbatim sources in the piece. Why was that important?
A project like this needs to return to primary sources. It needs to place theatre at the service of the narratives and lived experiences of its protagonists, rather than instrumentalising them for the development of a performance piece.
Why fictionalise memory when it can be shared through lived experience? The challenge for us as a collective is not to invent a text, but to embody these voices. It is not about writing; it is about embodiment — about finding theatrical strategies that allow testimony to retain its complexity, fragility and political force.
What’s next for you?
After the premiere, I will travel to Chile to begin rehearsals for El Beso de Rock Hudson, a theatre piece constructed from testimonies, interviews, documents and archival materials from people living with HIV, their emotional support networks, activists and healthcare workers in Chile.
The aim is to contribute to the construction and visibility of HIV+ memories, while also offering a contribution towards historical reparation by expanding public space for these narratives and acknowledging their affective, political and communal dimensions.