#nøborders

#nøborders
Menelaos Karamaghiolis

The moral crossroads that Menelaos Karamaghiolis’ new moving image works generate expand the video space and introduce a new kind of realism the filmmaker has been constructing throughout the past decade, by mapping what is not central in the geography of the heroic.

#no_border_films (2019) is the name of an Instagram account the artist has created for a group of video works to be part of selected, organized and uploaded by himself through a period of time. The viewer is able to experience the video given the time frame that Instagram allows. The video #nøborders, contrary to the Instagram version, can be viewed here in its full length. It depicts a ceremony where a man with a phone camera is the center point. The video is part of a larger project that started in a juvenile prison (and continues seven years after today) making its filming a functional “tool” for its protagonists to use and claim solutions to their problems.

We are watching a man holding a mobile phone over the dead body of an old woman, unsure if he is filming and slowly realizes that it is a tele-mourning ceremony alongside the actual one taking place in the room. It happens that as he has just been released from prison, he is under a travel ban and is not allowed to go to Albania where the actual burial of his mother is going to take place. He is connected to his sister in Fier who mourns in this ceremony that is being performed for him in Athens.