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
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Audiovisual work about postmortem punishment as it is depicted in the cultural conscience of the western world, using atmosphere as a narrative tool.
