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

Edgar Hudson (he/him) is a Tanzanian filmmaker and storyteller who uses art to spark conversations about climate, identity and social change. He trained at the MultiChoice Talent Factory and took part in the Earthshot Youth Programme. Combining cinematic storytelling with activism, he advocates for youth-led climate action and cultural awareness in Africa. His work explores resilience, community and the urgent need to rethink our shared future from a more sustainable perspective.

Bruna Kury

Bruna Kury (she/her) is an anarcho-transfeminist filmmaker, performer and multidisciplinary artist. Her work confronts structures of oppression based on gender, class and race. Her films challenge the dominant cis-heteronormative system through radically poetic resistance and collective creation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she released two independent films produced in Germany: What If We Started to See Colonization as an Uncontrolled Infection of the Cis-tem? and Gentrification of Affections. Both explore decolonial perspectives and narratives of resistance. In 2025, she released Scorpionikas – Counter-Manifesto with MigrantaFilms: a journey across continents that uses militant and experimental cinema to amplify the voices of trans and travesti women, sex workers and racialised communities.

Matheus Mello

Matheus Mello (they/them) is a filmmaker working between Brazil and Spain. Their work explores identity and migration. Mello has collaborated with filmmakers including Lucrecia Martel, Pedro Costa and Werner Herzog on educational workshops to support emerging talent.

Mello has produced short films, a documentary and video installations shown at festivals including Tallinn Black Nights, Raindance, Sitges, IDFA, Rotterdam and Zinebi. They have taken part in programmes at the Sundance Institute, Realness Institute Creative Producer Indaba, EGEDA Next Gen Film FinLab and Jihlava Emerging Producers. Mello also co-founded Migranta Films to create authentic stories that resonate across continents.

Sido Lansari (he/him), born in Casablanca in 1988, is a multidisciplinary artist living between Paris and Tangier. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, he directed the Cinémathèque de Tanger from 2019 to 2022. Through embroidery, photography and film, he explores identity, gender and sexuality, paying particular attention to what is silenced or erased from memory.

In 2019, his short film The Last Paradise won the Grand Prize at the Chéries-Chéris Festival in Paris. His work has been shown internationally, including at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm.

Micaela Cyrino (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from Grajaú in São Paulo, Brazil. She works in painting, embroidery and performance, and holds a degree in visual arts from Santa Marcelina College. Her work explores the Black female body, memory and ancestry, developing the idea of ‘drinkable memories’.

Cyrino has lived with HIV since birth and uses art to challenge stigma and prejudice. She is a member of Trovoa and works as an arts educator and consultant.

The programme responds to a time of growing neocolonialism and increasing desensitisation to violent, preventable deaths, including recent rises in HIV infections and deaths. According to the Visual AIDS programme text, this resurgence is being fuelled by cuts to international aid programmes such as USAID and PEPFAR. It reveals how broader US and Western power structures continue to determine access to care: whose lives are protected and whose deaths go unnoticed.

seeds in a dying colony explores how systems that abandon people and cause premature death lead to alienation from the self and breaks in memory, history and cultural continuity. At the same time, movement, ritual and beauty emerge as ways to regain a sense of direction: to reclaim the body and turn towards life within conditions that constrain it.

The title draws on the work of psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon. Some AIDS historians and theorists use his writing on colonial violence and the racialised psyche to understand how global health systems, shaped under colonial rule, determine the order, quality and conditions in which people receive care. These systems also overwrite Indigenous knowledge of health and embodied life. Rather than treating HIV as an isolated issue, the programme points to the tension between seemingly permanent systems of domination and the latent power and ancestral knowledge held within their dismantling.

The artists were selected by a jury of filmmakers. Each jury member chose an artist to mentor during the production process. The mentors for 2026 are Amil Shivji, Hiura Fernandes, Ésery Mondesir and J Triangular.