Loukia Alavanou

Composed of ‘collaged’ fragments from cinematic sources interweaved with my own film sequences, my films and multi-channel installations are an exploration of the influence of film in 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 Verfremdungseffect. Having grown in a politically active communist family in the transitional years of post-dictatorship Greece, exclusively exposed to soviet films and cartoons until the age of ten, I embrace montage as a vehicle of parodying propaganda, exaggerating contradictions and manipulating the ‘real’.

While the emphasis of the films is on ‘the cut’ and while sound dictates my surreal narratives, the found footage assembled comes from many different sources: From abstract images in early Walt Disney cartoons to Igmar Bergman’s Victorian dollhouses copied from VHS, foley sounds extracted from postwar British Technicolor films or low-resolution short fragments of pornographic web videos. For my own filming and recordings I use and assemble together footage from various different technologies too, bringing them all on the same surface. I treat the surface of film allegorically, using ‘the cut’ as a potential ‘rend’ or ‘rapture’ of that surface. Often referring to and influenced by historic animation, early associative montage techniques and psychoanalysis, I explore the immense potential of ‘the cut’ as both a way of deceiving and of ‘making strange’.