Loukia Alavanou
Loukia Alavanou is a moving image artist and filmmaker. Her film “On the Way to Colonus”, co-produced by Onassis Culture, was the first VR360 film ever produced in Greece. In 2018 Alavanou held a retrospective exhibition at State of Concept, Athens, where her VR180 video installation New Horizons-Pilot premiered. The work explored today’s post-industrial wasteland of Aspropyrgos, Western Athens, in relation to Futurama and pre-war propaganda and was characterized by ARTFORUM as “exceptional”. She is currently looking into VR viewing in relation to the work of futurist architects such as Takis Zenetos and his posture chair for digital projections and immaterial environments..
Loukia holds an MA in Photography from the RCA in London. For biographical reasons, her art practice may relate to certain elements of British film history, past and present, but it is also indebted to other places, notably Greece, and Latin America. This situational vagueness – a welcome antidote to the much vaunted site- specificity – is a driving force for Alavanou; Her collage-like films refer to places both real (Greece, England) and imaginary (cartoons, cinema), yet dwell in atopological dark spaces: post-capitalist ruins, gold mines and the dark rooms of photography and cinema.
Loukia is the winner of the 5th Deste Prize. Her works have been presented by institutions and festivals including KANAL Centre Pompidou, Gucci Garden, Kino Der Kunst, Palais de BOZAR, Palais de Tokyo, Athens Biennale, Moscow Biennale, Fiorucci Art Trust, The Museum of Cycladic Art, Benaki Museum, Viennale. Her films are part of numerous collections including the Onassis Collection, the Dakis Joannou Collection, The Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe/ ZKM, PCAI/ Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative.
ON THE WAY TO COLONUS
Year Completed: 2020
Runtime: 20min
On The Way To Colonus is a VR360 ‘docufictional’ film cast with Romani amateurs residing at the ghettoazed toxic wasteland of today’s Thriasian Plain, west of Athens, where Sophocles’ exiled hero “Oedipus at Colonus” is meant to have passed from.
Teaser video: https://youtu.be/iBxbcgmNJOg