A Research and Practice Laboratory
Pre-enactment as Method: Loops and Spirals Toward the Not-Yet
Pre-enactment as Method: Loops and Spirals Toward the Not-Yet
Who
Αrtist, writer, and scholar Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński and artist, academic, and publisher Pablo Lerma, with curator Natasha Christia.
When
June 11-14, 2026
10:00-20:00
4 days in Athens
How to Apply
Apply through the online form until 3 June 2026.
Limited to fifteen (15) participants.
How does the camera open pathways of encountering the not-yet? What questions keep returning in our artistic practice — and what do we find each time? If time were a spiral, at which point do we decide to enter it? What is sensed, rather than seen, when we stop rehearsing the known? How do we work on intersectionality and deep listening within a shared visual practice?
Overview
This year’s laboratory takes its point of departure from “pre-enactment,” a term introduced by Oliver Marchart in Conflictual Aesthetics. “Pre-enactment” refers to artistic practices that anticipate a future political event that has not yet been fully experienced. Here, the “political” is understood as an inherently conflictual condition, involving the convergence and eruption of antagonistic views that simulate situations before they actually occur.
Set against the backdrop of an era that increasingly constrains imagination and forecloses any horizon, “pre-enactments” propose prefigurative practices that collapse temporal distance in a continuously mutating space. Unlike a rehearsal, which repeats a defined and known outcome, they do not prepare us for a specific result; rather, they train us to engage with the unknown and the unexpected, opening up to different temporalities, methodologies and modes of affective resonance and imagination. In this context, they translate into gestures toward possible futures: futures of entanglement, of rethinking visual practices, and of reconsidering their relation to what is yet to come.
In this laboratory, we will employ the figures of the loop and the spiral to explore how pre-enactment translates into our ongoing visual practices.
The loop appears here in a double sense: as a closed circle in which imagining the future is constrained, but also as a multi-temporal figure suggesting eternal return — persisting in the attempt to narrate what might have been or could be, and suggesting the possibility of revisiting and restoring. The spiral, by contrast, is an open form without fixed beginning or end, allowing for deviations, alternative paths and repair.
During their respective days, this edition’s instructors, Belinda Kazeem-Kamínski and Pablo Lerma, will develop exercises focused on intersectionality, deep listening, and intermediary collective processes, in order to interrogate the photographic document as both an embodied and an inherited archive. Together, 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 Greek and international 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.
How to Apply
Applications should be submitted through the online form by 3 June 2026.
Participation Fee
The fee for the workshop has been kept as low as possible in order to make the programme accessible to the widest possible range of participants. The participation fee is €400, payable in full upon confirmation of participation. Please note that transportation and accommodation costs for the activities in Athens are not included.
Contact
For any questions, please contact us at program@photofestival.gr
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This year’s instructors
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s artistic practice constitutes an interdisciplinary engagement with history and memory, situated at the intersection of research, process, and narration. Informed by Black feminist theory, her work examines the conditions and afterlives of African diasporic experience. Through a deliberate interplay of documentation and speculation, she constructs immersive narrative spaces that challenge linear temporal frameworks and fixed spatial assignments. Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at La Ferme du Buisson, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Art X Lagos, the Liverpool Biennial, Camera Austria Graz, Kunsthalle Wien, and Les Rencontres d’Arles. Her first monograph, H(a)untings / Heim-Suchungen, was published by Sternberg Press in 2023. Her work has received numerous awards, among them the Otto Mauer Prize (2023), the Art X Access Prize Africa Diaspora (2022), the Camera Austria Award (2021), the Doc Grant of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2018–2020), the Cathrin Pichler Prize (2018), and the Theodor Körner Prize for Art (2016). Her postdoctoral project Temp/rovisations is based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Pablo Lerma is a hispanic queer research-based artist, educator and publisher based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His artistic practice is developed at the intersection of image & text with a focus in visual archives and vernacular materials dealing with notions of collective memory, kinship, representation and queerness. His work takes various forms from photographic installations to publications. His writing practice is developed on multiple textual forms around its embodied knowledge and experiences, generating streams of words in the shape of auto-theory that pair with his research and artistic projects. His work has been exhibited at Photoszene (DE), PhotoEspaña (ES), The Finnish Museum of Photography (FI), Flowers Gallery (US), Konstanet (EE), Centro Huarte (ES), New York University (US), Fotoweek D.C. (US), SCAN International Festival of Photography (ES), La Fábrica (ES), and Fundació Foto Colectania (ES) among others. His publications are in collections including the Guggenheim Museum (US), Museum of Modern Art – MoMA (US), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – SFMoMA (US), Aeromoto (MX), Centro de la Imagen (MX), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US), and the International Center of Photography in New York (US), among others. He has been granted residencies with Artists Meet Archives (DE), MASSMoCA (US) and awarded with the Grand Prize of Curators Award PDN (US), Fundació Guasch-Coranty (ES) and Sala d’Art Jove (ES). He has been selected for Pla(t)form FotoMuseum Winterthur (CH) and nominated for the Vontobel Photography Prize (CH), First Book Award MACK Editions (UK), Critical Mass (US), and PDN 30´s (US). His work and writing have been featured at FOAM Magazine (NL), Unseen Platform (NL), British Journal for Photography (UK), Ain´t Bad Magazine (US), New York Foundation for the Arts (US), PDN Online (US) and PhotoInter China (CN). Currently, he is a senior lecturer in theory on art research and embodied knowledge. Until 2026, he was the head of the Social Practices department, a program study connecting artistic practices to gender studies, race studies, decolonial studies and new ecologies, in the BA programs at Willem de Kooning Academy, University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam. In the last decade, he has served as a faculty member in Photography & Social Justice at the International Center of Photography in New York. He runs the publishing project Meteoro Editions, a platform exploring publishing forms connected to archival practices and vernacular materials.