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{ "$type": "community.lexicon.calendar.event", "createdAt": "2026-10-28T16:27:46.044Z", "description": "Four newly commissioned videos that move through the afterlives of colonialism and the ongoing HIV epidemic.\n\nBeursschouwburg 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.\n\nseeds 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).\n\nThe 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.\n\nseeds 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nVisual 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.\nwww.instagram.com/visual_aids/\nwww.visualaids.org\n\nVideo Synopses\n\nEdgar Hudson, There is an Elephant in the Room\nA 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.\n\nBruna Kury and Matheus Mello, VENGANZA TRAVESTY (TRAVESTY REVENGE)\nA 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.\n\nSido Lansari, ON A BRIGHT DAY (C'ÉTAIT UN JOUR LUMINEUX)\nON A BRIGHT DAY (C'ÉTAIT UN JOUR LUMINEUX) 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.\n\nMicaela Cyrino, How to project your voice without causing an earthquake\nCarolina lives alone in an apartment…", "endsAt": "2026-12-02T18:00:00Z", "locations": [ { "$type": "community.lexicon.location.address", "country": "BE", "locality": "Brussel", "name": "Beursschouwburg", "postalCode": "1000", "street": "Auguste Ortsstraat 20-28" } ], "mode": "community.lexicon.calendar.event#inperson", "name": "Day with(out) Art seeds in a dying colony", "rsvpExpected": false, "startsAt": "2026-12-02T13:00:00Z", "status": "community.lexicon.calendar.event#scheduled", "uris": [ { "uri": "https://beursschouwburg.be/en/events/day-with-out-art-meet-us-where-were-at-1/" } ] }

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Day with(out) Art seeds in a dying colony

Its way through the pipeline

What the rules say about it

Upstream

What the rules say about it

Its way through the pipeline