Lying upon a Rock

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.
Spyros Kavvadias, Dimitris Gkrintzos, Andreas Vouliakis, Margarita Chalakatevaki
Related Works
The audiovisual work "Paralysis by Analysis" presents a combined experience that unfolds in two chapters of two and three dimensions respectively.
The narration of the basic changes in the life of an everyday man during 2020. The deprivations, the adjustments, but also the losses he suffered during such a strange period of time. All this through the perspective of his daily activities within a single day.
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.
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?
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.
The portrait of Dimitra Samara, a talented dress designer, who decided to pursue her dream only a few years ago. A great misfortune in her life brought her closer to her dreams. The only way to overcome her shock was to escape through her passion. So, through a voice-over narration and the creation of a dress, from scratch to its final form, we follow a parallel evolution: That of the red dress and of her own self.












