It’s Monday, the 13th of December 1943, the small town of Kalavryta is set on fire by the occupation army of Nazi Germany while the entire male population is being gathered on a nearby hill and shot dead. This war crime will go down in history, along with the massacre of Acqui Division, as the largest mass killing in Greece during WWII. Three men who witnessed these events as kids, locked up with the rest women, children and elderly people in Kalavryta’s primary school, recall this traumatic experience.

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.

In this video art work 39 persons of different ages are invited to sit in front of the same black door, talk about their favourite object and in what, by using this object, they could be transformed. In the final cut only the silent expressions are kept.

Where do memories go when they are lost? Are they still where we left them, if we don’t recall them? In this room, as private and irrevocable as our memory, objects animate a series of scenarios. A memory floods the room, another struggles to disclose itself, another one leaks back and forth in time. The idea of the ‘other’ hovers between what has already passed and what is reminisced every time. We never recollect events and spaces as such. We always enliven recollections in our own way. Through constant evocations that seek to perpetuate the existence of the ‘room’, memories converse with space and time, as well as with a part of ourselves. Either as past, forgetfulness or loss, they always contain something that is already gone.

BRAINRINTH is a multi-channel video installation. The work attempts – through technology – to approach brain-related functions of memory, drawing on material from personal experience of the body in crisis. The title BRAINRINTH –from the words Brain and Labyrinth – is a play on the intractable riddle of an archetypal Greek structure (the labyrinth) and the labyrinthine processes of the human brain. The BRAINRINTH installation seeks a poetic mapping of the human brain.
Due to the shock of trauma, our understanding of the functioning of the body, and of nature itself –which we are trying to dominate – seems desperate and full of anxiety. Taking this into account, if we adopt a position in which we keep a distance of aesthetic neutrality, perhaps this reality begins to look less frightening.

When the observer is standing in front of a work of art and is trying to comprehend it, they are consciously entering a recognition process. This is achieved because the brain recognizes the relationship between some shapes or colors in the piece of art and, automatically, recalls them from memory. This procedure creates the necessary conditions for the creation of new neural synapses. Using these facts?, the artist suggests an audiovisual performance that includes an interference of audio to the visual aspect? in real time.

Aynadamar: An important place as far back as when the Arabs were in the area. The whole region of Andalusia was supplied with water through that spring, reaching as far as Madrid. Several years later, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is taken there to be executed. His work in turn supplied the whole Spain and spread to the rest of the world. The documentary intertwines significant events of his life with dramatised excerpts from his work, aiming at achieving Duende (as Lorca used to say), the quintessence of all things.

A place of relative isolation and no influence from the outside environment. Black cloth with a small opening that the viewer enters wearing headphones and playing a soundscape I created on a magnifying glass.