The Forest@Bios_by Violet Luise

Bios, Ομάδα Universalia, The Forest

Δευ 31 Οκτ 2011 - Τρι 13 Δεκ 2011

Ομάδα Universalia

The Forest

Πρεμιέρα 31 Οκτωβρίου

Μια performance που έχει ως βασικά συστατικά το λόγο, την εικόνα και τον ήχο, η οποία αναδιαπραγματεύεται την έννοια της αγάπης, όχι με τυπικούς – κοινωνικούς όρους, αλλά μέσα από ένα βαθύτερο και πιο ουσιαστικό πρίσμα. Υπάρχει αληθινή αγάπη ή επίφαση αγάπης; Είναι ένα συναίσθημα απόλυτο ή έχει μία δυναμική που ο καθένας τη χρησιμοποιεί, όπως επιθυμεί, κατά περίσταση;

«Γιατί να μην μπορούμε να αγαπιόμαστε; Όλοι άνθρωποι είμαστε. Ο Θεός μας έπλασε από το ίδιο χώμα.»

Μια κοπέλα ζει απομονωμένη σε ένα «δάσος» που έχει φτιάξει μέσα στο δωμάτιό της. Καταγράφει ιστορίες αγάπης για να ξορκίσει το κακό που μεγαλώνει μέσα της. Παίζει με τη σιωπή, τις εικόνες, τους ήχους. Ένα high tech freak που κρύβει τα gadget της στα φυτά και παίζει με αυτά σαν να ήταν κούκλες . Κρύβεται πίσω από τις φυλλωσιές, αλλάζει μορφή για να αποφύγει την αλήθεια, όταν αυτή την πληγώνει. Και ένα μυστικό που έρχεται και ξανάρχεται, κρατώντας την εγκλωβισμένη ανάμεσα στο παρελθόν και το παρόν της.

Σκηνοθεσία/ Performance: Λουΐζα Κωστούλα

Κείμενο: Ομάδα Universalia

Ηχητικός σχεδιασμός: Βασίλης Κουντούρης (Studio 19)

Video: MANOSg

Photos: theotrian

parARCHsites_A parasitic green sprawl in the heart of Athens

a radical urban devellopment project based on the parARCHsites logic. An urban experiment on the heart of athens.

collaboration D.Vogiatzaki, T.Triantafyllidis

In the Woods

Two boys and a girl, archetypes on a paganistic journey in which nature guides the senses and emotions. Minimal dialogue, silence, sounds. Fear, freedom, instinct, desire, pansexuality and always the feeling that something’s looking down from above. Filmed using the video function of a digital photographic camera, imbued with the uncanny and packed with intense hues and violent forms, In the Woods is an existential fairytale red in tooth and claw. A film as elemental as stone, as water or the sky.

Director’s note

This is not a love song

…this sense of worship we always reserve for those who have
no qualms about exercising their ability to cause us pain

Marcel Proust
Swann’s Way

The babe in the cradle waves its arm and thinks the whole world’s moving. His mother’s singing and the baby does not know it’s silent. The world is one. Indivisibly. The babe will learn to distinguish in a while. To comprehend its needs. That it and its mother are separate creatures. The pain! Everything’s fragmented. Everyone’s alone.

Two boys and a girl. Quite alone. Trying to come together. To become one again. Around them, huge tree trunks, translucent rivers, an isolated beach, the mountains, and an uncanny red house buried deep in the woods. Why is it there? Who has abandoned them to innocently hurt each other so very much? What is this strange sexual urge exuding from the trees, the water, the leaves? Are they free or trapped? There are no answers. Their journey’s like an initiation. As our journey was when we made this film.

Like children abandoned in the woods by our parents, our experience in nature transcended us. For two months, we slept in tents and ate by the light of the campfire. Without a script, we made the film with the actors day by day, marking the passage of time on our own personal calendar. The trunks determined our thoughts and guided our gaze. A crew of five plus three actors. Our equipment: a consumer digital photographic camera (we used its video function to film the entire movie), a sound recorder and a laptop.

This instinctive approach to dramaturgy demanded an equivalent shooting method that left us free of technical restrictions.

The decision to use a lo-fi digital camera instead of a proper camera imposed a new mode of filming. It allowed me to get in ever closer with my little camera: reach-out-and-touch close, wanting-to become-one-with-them close. To lick the stones or make love to the sand. And other times to train a narrow-angle lens on the bodies, like a documentary on the senses. But making contact, not removed like a voyeur. With the same desire to touch, to kiss, to bite, to become one. To rapturously escape the bounds of oneness. A sexual recording mode for a film about the materiality of emotions. Like a Fauvist painting with its deliberate outlines, intense coloration and violent forms.

Angelos Frantzis

info

Little gardens of happiness@TAF

“Near to the sorrow of the world, and often upon its volcanic earth, man has laid out his little gardens of happiness;” Guided by the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, the curators attempt to pose timely questions regarding the possible ways in which societies react in times of crisis.

Man has the inherent tendency to voluntarily create for himself personal microcosms; small, intimate utopias that safeguard his remaining shreds of happiness. This personal space seems to operate as a symbolically protected garden – shelter.  Sometimes however, these gardens transform into a personal hell where the individual feels isolated.

To what extent do these personal universes offer relief, to what extent do they cause terror and how extreme can they become? In this present time of uncertainty the little gardens of happiness can operate as spaces of self-organization and reevaluation, as sources of contrivance and as spaces of invention and mental formation and help us provide answers to the questions posed by reality itself.

info

Christmas

photo by theo trian