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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 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."
This changing frame represents an allegorical image of human nature, which when it is in dialectic with the outside world - during the transition from private to public life, experiences conflicting feelings of apprehension, anticipation, reticence, curiosity and extroversion.
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.
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.
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 video is a documentation of a spatial installation with a dual role, through viewing / observation and participation. The investigation of the relationship that develops between digital and real space, acting in it, as the main axis of the narrative, the human being is the framework of the research with object of study the concept of metaphor to the coexistence of experience as a narrative and of the experience of the present as a fact of performance. The real environment through recording projected into an analog painting and transferred to a digital environment (images-video- video projection) connecting the real, the digital and painting form. Respectively, the natural environment of the installation transferred to the projection surface, in a digital space, via the camera and projector.
The research documentary A Quest for Eternity (2020) focuses in four different elements of Angelopoulos’s style and provides new information using and analysing the data from semi-structured interviews. This research documentary is part of Dr. Iakovos Panagopoulos practice based Phd research in the University of Central Lancashire with the title: “Reshaping Contemporary Greek Cinema Through a Re-evaluation of the Historical and Political Perspective of Theo Angelopoulos's Work”(Panagopoulos, 2019).
