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
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A day in my mother's life. The documentary shows her daily routine, something that I personally find very interesting as I believe that the true self of a person lies in the "insignificant".
This changing frame represents an allegorical image of human nature, which when it is in dialectic with the outside world - during the transition from private to public life, experiences conflicting feelings of apprehension, anticipation, reticence, curiosity and extroversion.
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 video is a documentation of a spatial installation with a dual role, through viewing / observation and participation. The investigation of the relationship that develops between digital and real space, acting in it, as the main axis of the narrative, the human being is the framework of the research with object of study the concept of metaphor to the coexistence of experience as a narrative and of the experience of the present as a fact of performance. The real environment through recording projected into an analog painting and transferred to a digital environment (images-video- video projection) connecting the real, the digital and painting form. Respectively, the natural environment of the installation transferred to the projection surface, in a digital space, via the camera and projector.
The quarantine's experience time has functioned as a humanized time. Its previous social barbarity was imprisoned in the familiar cage of my soul and became my creation time. Each day was my friend, an eternal circular and dynamic present, a consciousness without conflicts. It was like an eternity that is experienced differently every moment. An unprecedented form of stillness gripped me and perpetuated in many abstract fragments which finally formed the new texture of my existence, in this peculiar isolation. I became from the carcass of time I was before, its qualitative disintegration… Reality was distorted and experienced illusively. The time from the alienation that was before, was transformed and became the cover for the scratched truth of myself. This kind of time my conscience had dreamed to live.
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?
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.