Re-enactment as Method: Loops and Spirals Toward the Not-Yet
Photography as Relational Practice returns for its second edition as part of Athens Photo Festival 2026. Conceived as a research and practice laboratory, the program explores relation as a way of thinking, making, and experiencing lens-based practices.
This year’s theme — Pre-enactment as Method: Loops and Spirals Toward the Not-Yet — takes its point of departure from “pre-enactment”, a term introduced by Oliver Marchart to describe artistic practices that anticipate political events not yet fully experienced. Here, the political is understood as inherently conflictual, marked by the convergence of antagonistic positions that simulate situations before they occur.
In a moment that increasingly constrains imagination and forecloses horizons, pre-enactments propose prefigurative practices that collapse temporal distance within a continuously mutating space, by engaging with uncertainty and opening toward different methodologies and modes of affective resonance. They become open-ended gestures toward possible futures of entanglement, of rethinking visual practices, and of reconsidering their relation to what is yet to come.
Led by Belinda Kazeem-Kamínski and Pablo Lerma, together with programme curator, Natasha Christia, this edition will employ the figures of the loop and the spiral to explore how pre-enactment translates into our ongoing visual practices: the loop as both constraint and repetition, but also as persistence and return; the spiral as an open, shifting form that allows deviation, alternative paths and repair.
Together, we will develop exercises focused on intersectionality, deep listening, and collective processes, interrogating the photographic document as both an embodied and an inherited archive. We will examine our own regimes of representation, moving through questions of proximity, otherness and decoloniality, and toward the integration of writing and sound in the shaping of a visual work.
Requirements
The laboratory welcomes photographers and visual artists, practitioners, scholars, and educators working in lens-based culture with an ongoing project at a mature stage, at the core of which are community-based and socially engaged approaches, archival modes, and embodied performative practices.
While participants may bring existing projects, the laboratory is not project-driven; it focuses instead on questions surrounding photographic practice, the medium itself, and its modes of engagement with the world.
Outcomes will be publicly presented during the festival.
Language: English.
A detailed description of the workshop is available on the Athens Photo Festival website.
Applications should be submitted through the online form by 3 June 2026.
