DAY WITH(OUT) ART 2026: SEEDS IN A DYING COLONY (FREE SCREENING!)
For Day With(out) Art 2026, Visual AIDS presents seeds in a dying colony, a program of four newly commissioned videos that move through the afterlives of colonialism and the ongoing HIV epidemic. Across fractured histories and landscapes marked by extraction, the works trace how systems of power shape the body, memory, and experiences of care. The program responds to a moment marked by deepening neocolonialism and mass desensitization to violent, preventable death, including recent spikes in HIV cases and deaths. The title draws from the work of psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose writings on colonial violence and the racialized psyche have been taken up by some AIDS historians and theorists to understand how global health systems, formed through colonial rule, ultimately determine the order, quality, and conditions under which people receive healthcare, while also overwriting indigenous knowledge of healthy, embodied living. Rather than isolating HIV as a singular issue, seeds in a dying colony gestures toward the tension between systems of domination that appear enduring and the latent power and ancestral knowledge that remains in their undoing. The artists in this program were selected by a jury of filmmakers who each selected an artist to mentor through their production process. The mentors of the 2026 program include Amil Shivji, Hiura Fernandes, Ésery Mondesir, and J Triangular. Edgar Hudson THERE IS AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM (2026, 9.5 min, digital) A young person flees home after a life-altering discovery, carrying the weight of things that cannot be said out loud. He encounters an activist fighting to be heard and a care worker sustaining others through daily acts of survival. Through dance and movement, the film offers a quiet story of survival, exile, and return, asking what it takes to face the elephant that everyone knows is there. Bruna Kury & Matheus Mello TRAVESTY REVENGE / VENGANZA TRAVESTY (2026, 7.5 min, digital) A visual manifesto that transforms the HIV virus into a mirror of empire, where data, propaganda, and flesh collide. Through a frenetic digital collage, the film exposes the biopolitical machinery that controls the body and weaponizes borders against life itself. Sido Lansari ON A BRIGHT DAY / C'ÉTAIT UN JOUR LUMINEUX (2026, 19 min, digital) ON A BRIGHT DAY weaves together archival echoes, poetic fragments, and testimonies of Arab queer lives touched by HIV, spanning generations and geographies. Through the voices of the dead and the living, the film transforms silenced histories into a collective act of remembrance and resistance. Micaela Cyrino HOW TO PROJECT YOUR VOICE WITHOUT CAUSING AN EARTHQUAKE (2026, 16 min, digital) Carolina lives alone in an apartment on the outskirts of São Paulo. Every morning she faces the city's frenetic pace during the long commute from her home to work. In her thoughts, her grandmother's wisdom always returns; in her headphones, it's always the same rap. In her bag, she carries the book of recipes, baths, and blessings she inherited from her grandmother and the desire to end the day well.