Call for Video Proposals: Day With(out) Art 2025

They understand harm reduction as a framework that encourages meeting and supporting people where they are rather than prescribing a specific model of health and wellbeing. They hope to emphasize the invaluable role that harm reduction has played in saving lives and providing pathways to autonomy and community support.

Videos will premiere on December 1, 2025 at over 150 venues worldwide as part of Day With(out) Art/World AIDS Day.

Theme 

• Drug Use & Harm Reduction
  • For Day With(out) Art 2025, Visual AIDS will commission five short videos that center the experiences of drug users and harm reduction practices as they intersect with the ongoing HIV crisis.
  • Harm reduction has long been at the heart of the AIDS movement through practices like needle exchange and safe injection sites, and people who use drugs have been impacted by AIDS from the earliest days of the epidemic. Historically, stories about drug use and HIV have positioned people who use drugs as statistics or precarious subjects, rather than narrators or leaders of harm reduction practices. They rarely hear the voices of drug users, even within AIDS culture, and recreational drug use continues to be criminalized and stigmatized across the world.
  • The 2025 program will reflect a broad range of perspectives and stories around these themes, while prioritizing the first person point of view of current and former drug users. Possible directions include videos that:
    • Share unspoken histories or new approaches to harm reduction—particularly from the perspective of drug users and people living with HIV
    • Reposition drug use from a narrative of personal responsibility/moral failing to a focus on systemic and institutional failures
    • Express stories focused on pleasure, sexuality, and joy or emphasize community support amongst users
    • Highlight the role drugs have played in relieving pain and anxiety, particularly as end of life support throughout the AIDS epidemic
    • Consider how drug use looks different, is accepted, stigmatized, or ignored across racialized and gendered experiences and/or across borders
    • Delve into stories of loss, remembrance, and memorial particularly for people living with HIV
    • Discuss sobriety and what it has offered within one’s personal journey
    • Examine the carceral system in relation to drug use and and imagine pathways to decriminalization and restorative justice
    • Emphasize the work AIDS activists have contributed to legalization of drugs
    • Showcase a nonlinear, experimental, or abstract artistic view of drug experiences
    • Use allegorical or fictional storytelling elements

Funding Information

• Up to five selected artists will receive a $3,000 honorarium to produce a short video work (6–8 minutes).

Eligibility Criteria

• They welcome proposals from both emerging and established artists in a range of forms, including documentary, narrative, and experimental. Collaborative proposals are also welcome.
• Anyone may submit a proposal, regardless of geographic location or HIV status. Artists and filmmakers who are living with HIV are encouraged to apply.
• Proposals should be submitted in English but may be translated with Google Translate or ChatGPT prior to submission. For the second year they are offering a Spanish language application page, but request that all materials be provided in both Spanish and English.
• Commissioned videos may be in any language. Visual AIDS will work with artists to produce English subtitles. Applicants should be aware that communication with Visual AIDS during the commission process will require some use of English, though they are happy to utilize translation tools over email and Zoom.

Selection Criteria

• Jurors will evaluate proposals based on the following criteria:
  • Thematic relevance: Does this encourage reflection or provoke conversation around the themes outlined above?
  • Strength as artwork: Can you visualize the video as proposed? Does it seem like a compelling artwork?
  • Past work: Does the work sample and proposal suggest that the artist will be able to execute their proposed project as described and on schedule?

For more information, visit Visual AIDS.