Riot - Strike - Riot

This is the first video of my audiovisual installation entitled "Riot Strike Riot". The audiovisual installation entitled "Riot Strike Riot" is based on the political repression and social disorders of recent years with a focus on Greece, but also with influences from abroad. The installation has presented from a subjective point of view, the socio-political image of today through audiovisual digital media, interactive systems, and objects.
Giorgos Gargalas - Theatro Anapoda
Related Works
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.
Τhis piece refers to a suffocating relationship between a father and a son. This oppressive relationship is expressed by the father’s obsessive calls to the son to come and eat his food warm. The son lives in an imperative rhythm of breakfast/lunch/dinner with few getaways because his father never stops calling him, while having a piercing voice. The father lives in a rhythm of constant orthostatic food production. A very elastic son, a very rigid father. A piece of wood, also rigid, who attracts the son. She had been washed by the sea. The highest boiling temperature is at sea-level. Splashing and seething became one. Apnea and immersion in his father’s pot, which is the symbol of his influence, eventually are leading to his release. He tightened so tight on her that for the first time he was stabilised. They were swept away from the waves and while floating they turned into furniture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The title of this artwork is "Where Do I Exist?". This is a virtual space that explores the relationship between reality and virtual reality. Moreover, it the result of a pandemic society that tends to communicate through social media. It is the impression of our lifes into a virtual world, free from our body and the stereotypes it might follows it. Could we be free from our body and ideas such as gender identity and death? What is the meaning of touch into an immaterial world? Anyone can be part of this artwork with a twitter hashtag of the word #immaterial.
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."
Zoe is a 25 year-old student, living in Corfu island, Greece with her only friend and roommate Anne. Waking up late an afternoon Zoe realises that her friend is missing and she goes out at night alone in search of her. The strangely empty and quiet town, a series of bizzare events and the sense that she's been followed gives her the realization that something strange is going on and her eager to find her friend grows stronger.
At that time she comes across a dark human figure that wants to capture her. Trying to escape, Zoe ends up in a white room with nothing but a mirror inside.
As she walks closer to the mirror she sees that someone is trapped inside a room. Thinking that it's her friend Anne she reaches and goes through the mirror into that other room.
As she sits down next to the other person, thinking that she is Anne, she realizes it's her own self. In a desperate and decisive moment she tries to save her double, only to realize that her double can not cross to the other side of the mirror. Realizing that there's no way out the double lets go of Zoes hand.
Zoe wakes up in her room in the morning, gets dressed and goes for a walk by the sea in the now fully alive and noisy town. As she stands and stares at the waves she meets a girl named Anne sitting nearby. After the two girls meet they sit by the sea talking.












