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
This is the first video of my audiovisual installation entitled "Riot Strike Riot". The audiovisual installation entitled "Riot Strike Riot" is based on the political repression and social disorders of recent years with a focus on Greece, but also with influences from abroad. The installation has presented from a subjective point of view, the socio-political image of today through audiovisual digital media, interactive systems, and objects.
Between 1920 and 1930 the writer Ernest Hemingway was at a bar in Paris with other artists. When he claimed he could write a story in just six words, everyone in the company made fun of him. Then he made a money bet with them, that he could indeed write a story formed in three sections - beginning, middle and end - in just six words. So, he took a napkin and wrote: "For sale: baby shoes never worn". He definitely won the bet, since his story was complete.
Τhis piece refers to a suffocating relationship between a father and a son. This oppressive relationship is expressed by the father’s obsessive calls to the son to come and eat his food warm. The son lives in an imperative rhythm of breakfast/lunch/dinner with few getaways because his father never stops calling him, while having a piercing voice. The father lives in a rhythm of constant orthostatic food production. A very elastic son, a very rigid father. A piece of wood, also rigid, who attracts the son. She had been washed by the sea. The highest boiling temperature is at sea-level. Splashing and seething became one. Apnea and immersion in his father’s pot, which is the symbol of his influence, eventually are leading to his release. He tightened so tight on her that for the first time he was stabilised. They were swept away from the waves and while floating they turned into furniture.
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.
BRAINRINTH is a multi-channel video installation. The work attempts – through technology – to approach brain-related functions of memory, drawing on material from personal experience of the body in crisis. The title BRAINRINTH –from the words Brain and Labyrinth – is a play on the intractable riddle of an archetypal Greek structure (the labyrinth) and the labyrinthine processes of the human brain. The BRAINRINTH installation seeks a poetic mapping of the human brain.
Due to the shock of trauma, our understanding of the functioning of the body, and of nature itself –which we are trying to dominate – seems desperate and full of anxiety. Taking this into account, if we adopt a position in which we keep a distance of aesthetic neutrality, perhaps this reality begins to look less frightening.
An experimental workshop was realized at the Corfu Archaeological Museum, on May 2019. The workshop was designed within the frames of interdisciplinary learning and participatory art, based on Maker culture and STEAM education, willing to highlight the importance of arts and technology in learning. The participants, children and adolescents 11 to 15 years old, were initially guided to an important archaic find at the Archaeological museum of Corfu, a pediment depicting ancient Greek goddess Artemis-Gorgo, and got acquainted with the myth surrounding it. In two groups the participants made
1. electronic circuits which produced sounds via photo resistor and conductive paint and
2. conductive drawings inspired by the archaic pediment imagery.
The two groups combined their work to create interactive installations were circuits and sensors were used to “read” the tonal variations and line elements of the pencil drawings. Documentation indicates the childrens’ immersion into the experience.
While we dream, much of the information that the brain involuntarily collects during the day, is intersected and integrated with previous experience and can be used in future behaviors.
