Winner Bourse du Talent 2026 : Sebastian Bruno

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Since June 2023, I have been collaborating with members of The Hive, a centre for autistic adults and people with learning disabilities based in Bristol, England. After getting to know one another, we began using theatre and photography as a shared language—a medium through which to move beyond mere observation and engage in collective, physical acts of imagination. Participants perform fictional scenes, often inspired by their own lived experiences, creating characters and alter egos. These sessions are open and fluid, with participants coming and going over time. A role or storyline emerges, fades away, only to resurface days later.

Drawing on Augusto Boal’s Augusto Boal Theatre of the Oppressed—which conceived theatre as a space where society’s oppressed could give direct voice to their own struggles in pursuit of political change—we explore how performance can unlock latent expressive and communicative capacities. The space becomes a laboratory of the senses—a place where gesture, sound, texture, and movement challenge the ordinary and give voice to inner experience.

Once printed, the images are returned to the participants. In their hands, the photographs become raw material for transformation: they are cut up, painted, annotated, and layered. They evolve into collaborative artefacts that reveal the participants’ energy, creativity, and subtle resistance to societal expectations.

Breathing exercises dissolve into collective movement. A simple white room transforms into a dance floor, a doctor’s office, or spaces inhabited by a reincarnated Margaret Thatcher, or by creatures born from the participants’ imaginations. Here, stillness carries as much meaning as action. Every gesture, every shift in posture, becomes an expression of self, community, history, and politics.

Sebastian Bruno’s work seeks to understand and explore the complexity of human relationships within their political, historical, and social contexts. Interpreting the world, communities, and individuals who have been overlooked in the name of progress drives him to create authentic and nuanced narratives that transcend the boundaries of traditional documentary practice. As a result, his work has evolved towards a collaborative approach to documentary-making, integrating photography, moving image, sound, text, and immersive installations.

Bruno was born in Buenos Aires in 1989. In 2010, he moved to Wales, where he studied Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales, graduating in 2015 before completing a Master’s degree in 2018. Since 2022, he has been based in Paris.

He has received numerous awards and commissions, including project grants from the Arts Council of Wales in 2016, 2020, and 2022, as well as support from Ffotogallery, the national photography development agency for Wales, in 2017, 2019, and 2021. His work has also been recognised through several distinctions, including the Premio Mallorca de Fotografía Contemporánea and the national Regards du Grand Paris commission. In 2019, his first film, The Dynamic, commissioned by BBC Wales, was nominated for a BAFTA Award.

His work has been published in book form by Ediciones Anómalas in 2018 and 2023, and by ICVL in 2023. He has also exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including at the Martin Parr Foundation, PhotoEspaña, the National Museum of Wales, the Fundación Luis Seoane, and Galerie Vu’, among others.