Ethno☰hauntology vol.1: A new festival connects Latin America with Athens through the persistent ghosts of history

From January 21 to 29, at NEWMAN cinema and the Kypseli Municipal Market, a new festival–laboratory of images, sounds, and ideas arrives in Athens, forging a connection with the other side of the Atlantic through the ghosts of history that return and refuse to fade.

Ethno☰hauntology vol.1 is a new film and art festival that explores how historical trauma, suppressed memories, and lost versions of the future resurface to haunt contemporary cultural memory. The festival program includes screenings of award-winning Latin American films-visionary, daring, and intensely atmospheric-presented at the Newman cinema.

In dialogue with the film program, an expanded contemporary art exhibition will take place at the Kypseli Municipal Market. Through a constellation of screenings, installations, talks, and performances, participating artists investigate how the “material ghosts” of history continue to haunt culture in the present. By mapping traces of memory and canceled future possibilities, the festival brings together artists, researchers, and audiences from Latin America and Greece, aiming to create a network of thought and action around spectral cultural memory.

Ethno☰hauntology – what is it?

Ethno☰hauntology vol.1 is grounded in an artistic manifesto first published in the film magazine Fantasma Material in December 2024. The manifesto proposes a methodology that engages with ghosts through cinema and art as a way of rethinking time, space, and social reality. This first edition in Athens functions as a living laboratory for applying this method within the framework of a festival.

Screening Week at NEWMAN

From January 22 to 28, 31 films from Latin America will haunt the screen of the Newman cinema. Poetic documentaries, genre cinema, experimental films, and hybrid works that move between forms bring to light the ghosts of colonialism, migration, political upheaval, and popular narratives that continue to shape contemporary Latin American societies. Most of the films will be presented in Greek premiere.

Each screening will be followed by an online discussion with the filmmakers or specialists connected to the work, while special festival guests will be announced in the coming weeks.

Art Exhibition at the Kypseli Municipal Market

From January 21 to 27, Ethno☰hauntology vol.1, in collaboration with the Kypseli Municipal Market, presents an expanded art exhibition centered on the hypermedia installation Pabellón de Melancólicos.

The exhibition draws a line connecting parallel phenomena and memories from Greece and Latin America. Passing through the ethno-hauntological gateway of Pabellón de Melancólicos, the viewer enters a universe where ghosts resonate, activated by an external force: artistic practice itself. As a work that also acts as a conduit for other works, Pabellón de Melancólicos sparks dialogues between entities that dismantle the linearity of space-time and propose new tools for measuring “socio-historical reality.”

This interaction reveals a landscape in which inherited narratives, processes of mourning, visions of the future, and collective imaginaries coexist and intertwine allowing us to discover, through others and their ghosts, a reflection of our own identity.

Alongside film screenings and the art exhibition, the festival unfolds through talks, workshops, performances, and sound presentations, conceived as living spaces of encounter and active participation among artists, researchers, and the public.

The full festival program will be announced soon.
For more information, please visit the Festival website.