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USA, New York, 2007

In 1988, at demonstrations against U.S. AIDS policy, David Wojnarowicz wore a leather jacket with the inscription: "If I die of AIDS - forget burial - just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A." (U.S. Food and Drug Administration). Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of 37. In 2007, Libera placed a box with a stone portrait of Wojnarowicz on the steps to the FDA headquarters. The work referred to Wojnarowicz's Untitled (Face in Dirt) from 1991. The police, thinking Libera was a freak who was selling soil, ordered him to take the crate from under the building under threat of jail. In his work, Wojnarowicz gave voice to the homeless, the sick, drug addicts, prostitutes, immigrants, and freaks, to whom it is easy to attribute and infuse guilt. He opposed Reagan's policies that stigmatized and excluded homosexuals, AIDS patients. He wrote about America as a "killing machine," a "tribal nation of zombies." He was close to Diane Arbus and her statement: "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats." Wojnarowicz, Arbus and thousands of others were and are among them.