greek pavilion Loukia Alavanou
The Hellenic Republic has chosen Loukia Alavanou (a videographer born in 1979) to represent the country at the national pavilion at this year’s Venice International Art Biennale. The curator of this exhibition is HeinzPeter Schwerfel, the excellent filmmaker whose back catalogue includes a remarkable film about Georg Baselitz ( Moi, Georg Baselitz, 2004), but also films about Jochen Gerz and Rebecca Horn. Although the curator of the Greek pavilion is of German nationality, he has been following Alavanou’s work for many years, and she asked him to accompany her throughout this Venetian adventure. He likes the “bitterness of her films, which do not necessarily seek immediate adherence,” and in any case do not play on seduction in any way.
OPEN LANDFILL
This new piece by Loukia Alavanou is based on a play by Sophocles, OEdipus at Colonus (written around 400 B.C.), where the king of the Labdacids, accompanied by his daughter Antigone, searches for a decent place to die and be buried. He arrives at Colonus, on the heights of Athens, where he was denied burial and final rest. Sophocles happened to be from Colonus. And today, a community of Roma has settled there, on an open landfill. And since they don’t have passports, they can’t be buried there either, just like Sophocles’ hero. After more than two millennia, the issues have barely evolved. Loukia Alavanou shot her OEdipus in Search of Colonus with amateur Roma actors in the grandiose and epic landscapes of the arid
Greek mountains. To do so, she used a camera equipped with a dozen optics so that the film would be recorded in so-called virtual reality and visible in 360 degrees. According to Heinz-Peter Schwerfel, it is a real immersive experience, which contrasts with the characteristic speed of the Venice Biennale (visitors run from exhibition to exhibition), and the health protocols that complicate everything nowadays, and will no doubt continue to do so for years to come. The film will be presented in the pavilion, under four domes designed in the style of Richard Buckminster
Fuller by a Greek architect,Takis Zenetos, who committed suicide in the 1970s and was also the creator of the armchairs in which spectators will have the opportunity to sit. n
Translation: Juliet Powys
Commissariat curator:
Heinz-Peter Schwerfel
De gauche à droite from left:
Loukia Alavanou. On The Way to Colonus. 2020. VR360. Photo du film still. On The Way to Colonus. Image de from pré-production. (© Loukia Alavanou)