Love gathers in many forms. This photo essay follows a first journey to Durban Pride 2026, documenting moments of celebration, activism, kinship, and belonging. Through images of marches, performances, families, and quiet acts of care, it reflects on how queer communities in South Africa continue to create spaces of visibility, resilience, and hope.

Muholi Art Institute reports from the opening of Gay Games XII València 2026, exploring global participation, inclusion, representation, and LGBTQIA+ solidarity as the Games make their historic debut in Spain and the Mediterranean region.

Muholi Art Institute will travel to Valencia, Spain, from 25 June to 6 July 2026 to cover Gay Games 2026 through photography, editorial storytelling, and behind-the-scenes coverage. The team will document the athletes, communities, cultural moments, and energy that define this global celebration of sport, pride, and belonging.

For the MAI AiR Panama Residency 2026, writer and researcher Mpho Molefe offers a meditation on a single day in Panama City — a day that moved through the sensory chaos of a food market, the quiet wisdom of the Museo de la Mola, and the stoic halls of the Casa de la Municipalidad.

What began as simple curiosity became a profound recalibration. In the museum, a Guna guide's explanation transformed the vibrant mola textiles from decorative craft into something far deeper: a language, a shield, a woman carrying a prayer for protection stitched into the very clothes on her body. Later, in the hushed corridors of city government, the weight of civic responsibility—the invisible labour of permits, zoning, and infrastructure—revealed itself as the bedrock upon which all art, all beauty, all storytelling ultimately rests.

“Creativity does not flow in a vacuum,” Molefe writes. “It flows through copper pipes laid by public works contracts. It flourishes under streetlights maintained by municipal budgets. The romance and the bureaucracy are not opposites; they are co-dependents.”

Read the full reflection on how a market, a museum, and a municipal building reshaped one artist's understanding of what holds a city — and its stories — together.