Artist’s Statment

Composed of “collaged” fragments from found cinematic sources interwoven with my own film sequences, my research-based moving-image works and installations are an exploration of the influence of film on the formation and structuring of memory. A layered soundtrack is used as a unifier, simultaneously creating a flow between the disparate images and a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. Having grown up in a communist context in the transitional years of post-dictatorship Greece, I embrace post-synchronization in cinema as a vehicle for parodying propaganda, exaggerating contradictions, and exploiting the “Real” and the “making-strange.”

The emphasis of my films is on “the cut,” and sound dictates my surreal narratives. The found footage that I assemble comes from various sources: abstract images in early Walt Disney cartoons, Ingmar Bergman’s shots of Victorian dollhouses found on VHS, Foley sounds from postwar British Technicolor films, voice-overs from US educational documentaries for children from the 1940s and ’50s, and low-resolution fragments of pornographic Web videos. I often use recordings of my own voice and assemble them with the found footage extracted from personal and social sources, bringing them all onto the same surface. I treat the surface of film as an allegory, using “the cut” within editing as a potential “rend” or “rupture” of that surface.

Often referring to and influenced by historical animation, early associative montage techniques, and psychoanalysis, my work explores the female voice in cinema, or indeed its absence or symbolic substitution, through the development of an increasingly personal language. In a manner akin to dreaming I assemble cinematic fragments with ghosts from the past, familiar objects, diaristic video and audio recordings, my fantasies, my toys, my late Cretan grandmother speaking on camera, and figures from folktales narrated from mother to daughter, generation to generation, especially the wicked witch from Hansel and Gretel, who I still believe is my own mother.