Eterotopia
Eterotopia. Place within a Place that violates real time. Restricted access and challenge area, between the real and the unreal. Comparable and competitive space that reflects the Iocation.
Related Works
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.
This artwork consists of multiple videos of scrolls down found in well-known social media, which were taken by smart phone and are displayed in a horizontal layout and continuous flow. On a second reading and as the viewer moves away from the individual information, he or she realizes that the Greek flag is formed in the video. The artwork seeks to ask questions about the ever-increasing use and abuse of social media in Greek everyday life. Being sometimes means of communication and information and sometimes tools of manipulation, social media make people concern and strongly influence society in its entirety, while the posts of their multiple users are now an integral part of our modern (digital) public space.
With the opportunity of the preparation of the trip, the productive process of maintenance, repair and work in the area of the shipyard, the project "Forest of Winds" is created. The project was named "Forest of Winds" because of the sound of the wind passing through the masts of the boats. The "Forest of Winds" is a 360 video animation evolving into a theatrical space and indefinite time. The video depicts the invisible side of a dream, the dream of a journey and its preparation with the forms of workers hovering impersonal in space as work uniforms, creating a choreographed kinesiological narrative process. The forms of workers rub, shine and accomplish all kinds of jobs with their repetitive motions, until they are left in space like objects in an endless free fall.
While we dream, much of the information that the brain involuntarily collects during the day, is intersected and integrated with previous experience and can be used in future behaviors.
The compositional method is based on the incorporation of sound material of cultural background into an electroacoustic piece. By drawing a linear narration, my aim was to demonstrate a unity, an imaginary community, which characterizes the Romani culture, despite the hybridic, complicated and diverse traditions deriving from the various European and Asian countries its people live in. A central question behind the making of this piece is what kind of role can a civilization have today, when the concept of space is eliminated by time- a key element in the dynamics of capitalism. What are the cultural consequences of the so-called annihilation of time and space, as materialized and tangible dimensions of social life? Are historical tradition and the search for roots promoted and reorganized as simulacra, imitations or/and museum culture, thourgh the demonstration of a partly deceptive past?
As Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" is one of my favorite paintings, I created an acoustic composition with the main goal of creating an atmosphere with a freer and more abstract approach. The small touches, the colors, the swirling flow, the natural landscape of the painting and the psychosynthesis of the artist are captured. The piece in combination with two images consists of three parts. In the first part, the night landscape is presented, in the second the intense emotions of the artist and in the third the nature with its power that calms the human soul.
