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
Where do memories go when they are lost? Are they still where we left them, if we don’t recall them? In this room, as private and irrevocable as our memory, objects animate a series of scenarios. A memory floods the room, another struggles to disclose itself, another one leaks back and forth in time. The idea of the ‘other’ hovers between what has already passed and what is reminisced every time. We never recollect events and spaces as such. We always enliven recollections in our own way. Through constant evocations that seek to perpetuate the existence of the ‘room’, memories converse with space and time, as well as with a part of ourselves. Either as past, forgetfulness or loss, they always contain something that is already gone.
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 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.
Creation of a group installation entitled Intersecting Worlds. The installation raises questions about the diversity and dynamics of the digital world, the limits and possibilities of technology and how it interacts and transforms contemporary life, creating new stimuli and a new way of looking at everyday life.
The subject of Charis Myrsilidi’s thesis concerns the transfer of literary text to image. The excerpts of the selected texts are stories from the Grimm brothers' fairy tales and the connecting link is the pattern of transformation (metamorphosis). The presentation of the practical part of the thesis concerns an installation with clay sculptures, sound track and lighting. The sculptural space is formed by Charis Myrsilidi, a student of the Department of Audio Visual Arts and the sound by the composer Ioannis Konsolakis.
A journalist, who has lost his identity, visits an uncanny land, in which the smile is banned by law. He feels lost in its dystopia, consisted of self-destructive people, who deplore the smile. He gains many personal experiences that make him unaware of his aim and his human state as well. Will he eventually be able to find a way out?
Presentation of 3d projection mapping, on Church of Panagia ton Xenon, Kyra - Faneromeni (Old Town, Corfu, Greece), October 2, 2020 at 10:00.
In the dissertation, following the strategy of deliberate ambiguity and crossing different eras, we go through a path of images and information, which express hope and fear in various fields and they characterize every culture and every society.
At the same time, moving from formalism to realism, it emerges that the Aristotelian definition of the representational unity of space-time-action is no longer valid in art. Undoubtedly, the formalist movement has shown that planes are understood not only as sequences of logical units, but also as theoretical or ideological conceptions, where their connection is not legitimized on the basis of the principle of space-time unit, but by some abstract theoretical model, such as is the model of metaphor, the path through contradictions, symbolism and anything else that enhances the removal of the theoretical model. But also internal realism, which is not a theory of truth, highlights the convergence of two seemingly incompatible ideas.
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.
The present postgraduate thesis was prepared in the context of the completion of the postgraduate program of the Department of Sound and Visual Arts of the Ionian University.
The study of the subject will be the facts and data on the occasion of the completion of 200 years since the Greek Revolution.
The present work aims to enrich the theoretical framework of study. Its structure is based on data that I have collected (rare photographic material, letters, etc.), from the Public Archives of the State, the Kapodistrias Museum and the Reading Company.
