Day With(out) Art 2026: seeds in a dying colony

On World AIDS Day, we are village holds a special ceremony to unite around issues associated with HIV and AIDS. The event includes creating an altar as a group, holding a small ceremony, followed by Visual AIDS film program.

For the Altar, participants are encouraged to bring anything that deals with the topic of HIV AIDS, illness, recovery and thriving as it relates to the color Red, a theme initiated by Visual AIDS. This altar is meant to express any and all personal experience with HIV and AIDS.

Following the altar we will hold a a few moments of silence as a group to then open the space up for personal reflections. Attendants are highly encouraged to participate in any capacity. Referencing Visual AIDS theme on the color red as a starting point, all voices will be treated equal. Be it loss, grief, anger, activism, indifference, or even historical interest, no voice is to be unheard.

PROGRAM

• open circle by Marcelo Alves

• Screening Day With(out) Art 2026: seeds in a dying colony

Edgar Hudson, There is an Elephant in the Room

Bruna Kury and Matheus Mello, VENGANZA TRAVESTY (TRAVESTY REVENGE)

Sido Lansari, ON A BRIGHT DAY (C’ÉTAIT UN JOUR LUMINEUX)

Micaela Cyrino, How to project your voice without causing an earthquake

• Closing

Day With(out) Art 2026: seeds in a dying colony

we are village  is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2026 by presenting 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.

seeds in a dying colony will feature four newly commissioned short videos by artists from across the world: Edgar Hudson (Tanzania), Bruna Kury and Matheus Mello (Brazil/Spain), Sido Lansari (Morocco/France), and Micaela Cyrino (Brazil).

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. Driven by cuts to international aid programs like USAID and PEPFAR, this resurgence reveals how access to care remains shaped by broader systems of U.S. and Western power that determine whose lives are protected and whose deaths are allowed to pass in silence. 

seeds in a dying colony is an exploration of how systems organized around abandonment and premature death produce disconnection from the self and disruptions of memory, history, and cultural continuity. At the same time, movement, ritual, and beauty emerge as forms of recalibration, methods of reclaiming the body and reorienting toward life within conditions designed to constrain it. 

The title of the program 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. Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.

** Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.