Excitatio Corcyrae : Player’s Guide
Related Works
Paraphrase, reference of the title to the depression caused by the shocking images of drowned children in the Mediterranean, the watery grave of persecuted refuges.
The quarantine's experience time has functioned as a humanized time. Its previous social barbarity was imprisoned in the familiar cage of my soul and became my creation time. Each day was my friend, an eternal circular and dynamic present, a consciousness without conflicts. It was like an eternity that is experienced differently every moment. An unprecedented form of stillness gripped me and perpetuated in many abstract fragments which finally formed the new texture of my existence, in this peculiar isolation. I became from the carcass of time I was before, its qualitative disintegration… Reality was distorted and experienced illusively. The time from the alienation that was before, was transformed and became the cover for the scratched truth of myself. This kind of time my conscience had dreamed to live.
The project is the animation of the fairy tale "The chained elephant". "The Chained Elephant" is one of the stories of psychiatrist Jorge Bukay from his book "Let me tell you a story" which he tells to his client. It refers to a child' s question who notices that a huge circus elephant remains tied to a small stick without trying to free itself and without protesting. The circus elephant remained tied to his tiny stick because "the memory of the weakness he felt shortly after his birth is etched in his memory."
A documentary about Lazaretto, the desert islet near the city of Corfu that functioned for centuries as a quarantine station as well as a place of execution for political prisoners during the Greek Civil War. The identity of the place is approached through fragmentary testimonies and original sources.
The current project is a digital, interactive, audiovisual application that can be used either as a virtual installation accompanied by a simultaneous projection of its content in the physical space or be distributed as an executable digital medium on any computer, compatible with its technical specifications. It examines the flow of information, its creation, collection, storage, interpretation and utilization through perceptual mechanisms that mutate -enhance or degrade- with the available tools of digital reality and its transformation from a sequence of serial, adjacent and referential values to one unified context, what is usually interpreted as meaning or significance. The participants of this reality are called upon to engage at the degree of signification that expresses them better, ranging from a purely perceptual and empirical viewing to a frantic clarification of everything included.
One week in ten minutes is a video in which the recording of unboxing, the act of opening the boxes, confronts the viewer with the repeated search in empty boxes that contain absolutely nothing. Each box is the promise of a gift which is to come, promising a gift whose dispatchment is always deferred.
An experimental workshop was realized at the Corfu Archaeological Museum, on May 2019. The workshop was designed within the frames of interdisciplinary learning and participatory art, based on Maker culture and STEAM education, willing to highlight the importance of arts and technology in learning. The participants, children and adolescents 11 to 15 years old, were initially guided to an important archaic find at the Archaeological museum of Corfu, a pediment depicting ancient Greek goddess Artemis-Gorgo, and got acquainted with the myth surrounding it. In two groups the participants made
1. electronic circuits which produced sounds via photo resistor and conductive paint and
2. conductive drawings inspired by the archaic pediment imagery.
The two groups combined their work to create interactive installations were circuits and sensors were used to “read” the tonal variations and line elements of the pencil drawings. Documentation indicates the childrens’ immersion into the experience.
This is a short film created in a lightbox and inspired by the song ‘Kemal’, written in 1968 by Manos Hatzidakis and lyrics by Nikos Gatsos. The song is about a hero, a guardian, a prince of the East, Kemal. His courage, his hope and valour to change the world depicts the lack of limits. Along with his naivety, the cruel reality of a world that never changes, lead him to his death. This song was written by Manos during his stay in New York. The version used in this film was performed by Mario Frangoulis, from the album “Feggari Erotevmeno”, 1999, Sony Music Entertainment Greece Α.Ε.
