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
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.
The film refers to the pandemic crisis of covid-19 in the country, after the enforcement of the restriction measures. It observes the everyday life of the town centre of Corfu. It includes the randomness of recording the reality, the contradictions and the paradox of it. It attempts to render the suffocating atmosphere, that has a huge impact on the everyday life and the psychology of the people.
"Dharmadhatu" is an experimental audiovisual video with linear narrative. It has been created with an original experimental technique, where each frame results from a live recording of the behavior of flowing colors on a painted surface.
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 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.
A young bicycle rider explains why he wants to spend so much time with this sport: The hard and great times that bike gives him.
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.
