https://vimeo.com/39081021
Please copy-paste the link to watch the animation on vimeo.
This is a short story about Athens in magic realism.
A film I made in the frame of my thesis in the diploma course at the Bartlett.
In Athens 2013, a primary school inhabited by 300 students
has formed its own ways of ruling one of the most devastated
neighbourhoods of the city, and is about to expand its boundaries
in the following years. The school’s architectural rules
demand obligatory cooperation between the neighbourhood’s
inhabitants for the production of a jam made from oranges found
on neratzies, trees that grow throughout the city and that can
withstand its pollution.
Obligatory cooperation is applied equally to each of the twelve
political teams formed within the school. Motivation for the
school’s rules to be obeyed comes from the potential unlocking
of closed playgrounds, guarded by the giant tree-man. These
playgrounds are supported by the columns of the National Bank of
Greece, which now make watermelon ice cream.
Allegory is researched as a tool for an anti-propagandistic
approach to socio-political criticism in uncertain times, and is
designed through a porous, ruinous and magic realist approach.
The notion of porosity is expressed in the unstructured boundaries
between the private and public realm, while the ruin is seen as an
essential fragment for the appropriation of the present. In order
to design for a city in crisis, I am using a magic realist narrative:
this is not a detailed projection of the future, but a socio-political
poetic critique of the present, forming potential ways of dealing
with it through possible but improbable realities.
