Negative Buoyancy, the story of a freediver

A freediver transforms into water while he dives beneath the surface, connects with nature and becomes a part of the underwater environment by hunting like a marine predator.
The mesmerizing underwater world is accessible to those who overcome fear and dare to push their human limits a little further in order to explore it. The passion with the serene world beneath the surface becomes a lifestyle for those who surrender themselves to negative buoyancy.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Multiple distance sensors trigger sound events ας people move around and get close to the grid with the srceens.
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."












