| Sumario: | This article explores Pepe Espaliú's 1993 performance El nido within both the context of the artist's formal output – ranging from installation, drawing and performance to poetry – and the implications of Espaliú's emphasis on "around" for conceptualizing space and time during and after the HIV/AIDS crisis. In El nido, Espaliú hangs a banner reading (in English) "AIDS is around", and my analysis departs from his declaration by accounting for Espaliú's choice of words at a time when the phrase "AIDS is ... " might be finished with any number of poetic, medical or political responses. This study charts around-ness in Espaliú's art to argue that his work signals a temporality premised not on linearity, but on a shared relation between the present and past or presence and absence. Ultimately, thinking spatially and temporally "around" allows for representational possibilities to be made from the absent, past and, seemingly, meaningless.
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