Demetris: A Visual Artist
The cinematic portrait of a visual artist, Demetris Papazachos, a senior student of the Fine Arts School in Thessaloniki, is about featuring an artist without just showing his artwork but emphasizing at his personality and his artistic thinking instead. Through his internal journey, gay culture elements are projected while an interesting question is raised: Who is "A Visual Artist" at last?
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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.
During quarantine, time passes without realizing it. Time is blurred with fears, worries and deformations. The realization that we are still "thoughtful creatures" in such an irrational world is something that grounds us back to reality. The film draws from the movement of French Impressionism.
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.
In the realm of acoustic hyper-reality we meet aural simulacra of the order of maleficence. These are signals that mask and denature a profound acoustic reality. They are referential and representational, but in a way that they dissimulate reality and become its twisted Doppelgängers. Simulacra of the order of maleficence are perversions of reality. With the sound artwork ‘Natural Perversion’ Through a set of sonic processes the artist delves into autogenerative, autopoietic, responsive and biomimetic modes of creation exploring how the original naturally produced audio signal can be transformed into a sonic caricature and depending on the way it balances between its signifier and its signified aspect, it may re-interpret naturally produced concrete audible events into a musical language which serves both the acousmatic and the non-cochlear approaches to contemporary sound art.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The subject of Charis Myrsilidi’s thesis concerns the transfer of literary text to image. The excerpts of the selected texts are stories from the Grimm brothers' fairy tales and the connecting link is the pattern of transformation (metamorphosis). The presentation of the practical part of the thesis concerns an installation with clay sculptures, sound track and lighting. The sculptural space is formed by Charis Myrsilidi, a student of the Department of Audio Visual Arts and the sound by the composer Ioannis Konsolakis.