The chained elephant

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."
Direction and animation: Papa Alkistis, Music and composition: Nicky Kokkoli, Sound engineer: Chrysanthi Matsagka
Related Works
A place of relative isolation and no influence from the outside environment. Black cloth with a small opening that the viewer enters wearing headphones and playing a soundscape I created on a magnifying glass.
This animation is a short presentation of moments from the lives of the residents of an apartment building. The central theme for the development of the story was to capture the image of some people living in an apartment building. Occupants of a building, people living next to each other and at the same time far away from each other. A situation that prevails in all big cities where the phenomenon of alienation between the inhabitants is very intense, especially in the buildings where they live, made me interested in creating this story.
To tell my story, I choose the windows of the apartments as a place to present the heroes. Windows have always been an element of the house, apart from the door, which connected the outside with the inside. Also, their role in earlier times was to communicate between the inhabitants, as well as many times they were used for pumping "gossip" between neighbours. In recent years these habits are not as strong as they used to be, but they still persist in some small areas, such as on the islands.
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.
This art piece is trying to express the struggle between letting go ας one would use nature for meditative reasons and the over controlling mind fixating on patterns deriving from sea foam lines.
The title of this artwork is "Where Do I Exist?". This is a virtual space that explores the relationship between reality and virtual reality. Moreover, it the result of a pandemic society that tends to communicate through social media. It is the impression of our lifes into a virtual world, free from our body and the stereotypes it might follows it. Could we be free from our body and ideas such as gender identity and death? What is the meaning of touch into an immaterial world? Anyone can be part of this artwork with a twitter hashtag of the word #immaterial.
It is an Interactive Installation that deals with the issues of immigration, wars and surveillance of citizens on a global scale.












