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
One week in ten minutes is a video in which the recording of unboxing, the act of opening the boxes, confronts the viewer with the repeated search in empty boxes that contain absolutely nothing. Each box is the promise of a gift which is to come, promising a gift whose dispatchment is always deferred.
Moments that meet and compose new ones through clips of a few seconds. Their common point is the associative thinking during their creation and the sense of the surrealistic-dreamlike mood.
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.
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.
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.
The research documentary A Quest for Eternity (2020) focuses in four different elements of Angelopoulos’s style and provides new information using and analysing the data from semi-structured interviews. This research documentary is part of Dr. Iakovos Panagopoulos practice based Phd research in the University of Central Lancashire with the title: “Reshaping Contemporary Greek Cinema Through a Re-evaluation of the Historical and Political Perspective of Theo Angelopoulos's Work”(Panagopoulos, 2019).
This is a short film created in a lightbox and inspired by the song ‘Kemal’, written in 1968 by Manos Hatzidakis and lyrics by Nikos Gatsos. The song is about a hero, a guardian, a prince of the East, Kemal. His courage, his hope and valour to change the world depicts the lack of limits. Along with his naivety, the cruel reality of a world that never changes, lead him to his death. This song was written by Manos during his stay in New York. The version used in this film was performed by Mario Frangoulis, from the album “Feggari Erotevmeno”, 1999, Sony Music Entertainment Greece Α.Ε.
In the realm of acoustic hyper-reality we meet aural simulacra of the order of maleficence. These are signals that mask and denature a profound acoustic reality. They are referential and representational, but in a way that they dissimulate reality and become its twisted Doppelgängers. Simulacra of the order of maleficence are perversions of reality. With the sound artwork ‘Natural Perversion’ Through a set of sonic processes the artist delves into autogenerative, autopoietic, responsive and biomimetic modes of creation exploring how the original naturally produced audio signal can be transformed into a sonic caricature and depending on the way it balances between its signifier and its signified aspect, it may re-interpret naturally produced concrete audible events into a musical language which serves both the acousmatic and the non-cochlear approaches to contemporary sound art.
