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
It’s Monday, the 13th of December 1943, the small town of Kalavryta is set on fire by the occupation army of Nazi Germany while the entire male population is being gathered on a nearby hill and shot dead. This war crime will go down in history, along with the massacre of Acqui Division, as the largest mass killing in Greece during WWII. Three men who witnessed these events as kids, locked up with the rest women, children and elderly people in Kalavryta’s primary school, recall this traumatic experience.
EX-SITU[existing situations] is an interactive installation that incorporates a computer, sound, and lighting technologies in which users/ viewers take part in the destruction of the painting by stepping on it. At the same time, a motion tracking system marks visitors and a light spot tracks them.
The content of EX SITU calls for awareness of social indifference, self-promotion, and their impact on society. The structure of EX SITU is intentionally ambiguous, revealing the obsession/fascination for the protection of material in contrast with the empathy for other people.
The interactive installation underlines the responsibility of individuals in society. The theoretical part analyses the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966 and The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present.
I closed my eyes and images began to flood my mind while hearing a sound. After many visualizations of the images into drawings I chose this narrative.
I chose to emphasize the vortex I was feeling.
It was a spontaneous way to record what I experienced.
Each person through his own sensors experiences the ambience of each condition. It all depends on the self, the internal, the mind, the way of perception, action, perspective.
So my own images, were born from my mind for my mind.
Maybe it is paranoia of the mind and one can emigrate it.
This is the most difficult,
the deconstruction of atmospheres - experiences - memories that contain emotion.
Because emotional paranoias are shadows nourished by repetition and persistence.
They dance as if they are Erinyes of the mind and the body gets to be an eradicated observer.
The project composes a series of random artifacts relating to art and design history, used either ας decorative or utilitarian artifacts, turning them into a non-definitive object [bouquet] floating in space.
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 Video installation in the exhibition emphasizes and at the same time negates the temporality of a medium whose dominant form of expression is space.
Aynadamar: An important place as far back as when the Arabs were in the area. The whole region of Andalusia was supplied with water through that spring, reaching as far as Madrid. Several years later, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is taken there to be executed. His work in turn supplied the whole Spain and spread to the rest of the world. The documentary intertwines significant events of his life with dramatised excerpts from his work, aiming at achieving Duende (as Lorca used to say), the quintessence of all things.
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.
