21-27 January 2026, Kypseli City Market, Athens
The Døcumatism collective and filmmaker Menelaos Karamaghiolis participated in the group exhibition Pavilion (38°00′02.9″ N · 23°44′16.1″ E), part of the multimedia festival Ethno☰hauntology vol. 1
The Døcumatism collective participated in the exhibition of the multimedia festival Ethno☰hauntology vol. 1 with the video installation A Bird in Search of a Cage. Τhe Etno☰hauntology vol. 1 festival, dedicated to the intersection of cinema and the visual arts, translates the conceptual and aesthetic framework developed in the Etno☰hauntología manifesto, originally published in the journal Fantasma Material in 2024. The manifesto proposes a methodology that engages specters through the use of cinema and art as a means of rethinking time, space, and social reality. This first edition in Athens functions as a laboratory for applying this method within a living festival. The festival curators sought to present the practice of the Døcumatism collective, which uses the moving image as a starting point for public actions that give a voice to those who feel “invisible” and “ghosts” of history. The presentation focused on the efforts of incarcerated minors to become visible, present, and empowered to claim a future and a history that they themselves want to write.
A Bird in Search of a Cage Menelaos Karamaghiolis & Døcumatism 2012-2019 | Digital video | 11’ 26’’
In his cell, a juvenile prisoner raises a bird that flies free outside its cage and becomes his best “friend” and a symbol of freedom inside prison. Little by little, the prisoner becomes a kind of “prison guard” when he realizes that the sexual awakening may upset the bird and fly away.
Excerpt from the exhibition’s curatorial note:
“The selected works operate as field exercises: sound compositions, installations, and audiovisual dispositifs that activate the presence of absences, drawing in what persists as remainder, interference, or specter. In this context, the exhibition does not present itself as a closed space, but as an experimental platform or site of rehearsal (Laboratory), where each piece provokes stimuli and becomes a channel capable of activating the spectator’s agency, thus giving continuity to an expanded process of research toward a collective, sensitive, and situated dimension. Within this framework, distinct narrative ecosystems emerge. Some focus on bodies traversed by confinement, violence, or resistance, whether through militancy, rebellion, or the need to inhabit one’s own body as a final territory. Others shift the focus toward space, understood both as a historical construction and as an environment of manifestation. Taken together, the works propose new ways of reading and measuring the surrounding reality -layering memories, mourning, and collective imaginaries- in order to reveal, in the specters of the other, a reflection of our own contemporary experience.”
The participating artists are Rafael De Jesús Ramírez, Oderay Ponce de León, Stratis Vogiatzis, Sol Prado, Menelaos Karamaghiolis & Døcumatism, Ilias Petropoulos, Aliki Finn & Cognitive Noise
