Première partie
Je(u): une enfance funèbre
Montage de diapositives. Succession d’images immobiles. Assemblages, jeux réalisés par Maria. Mises en scène baroques d’une enfance plâtrée, ornée, pailletée, reflétée, gisante, sublimée. Voiles, étincelles, sensualité des reflets, sensualité des ornements. Images créées par Maria et regardées (photographiées) par Katerina.
Deuxième partie
Action Inceste I
Film. Images en mouvement. Actions de Maria regardée (filmée) par Katerina. Celle qui joue (avec) l’enfant. Celle qui le (se) travestit. Celle qui reflète l’enfance reflétée. Mère, enfant, identification, affection, blessure, sang. Rubans de satin rose, les lèvres du sexe féminin.
Troisième partie
Action Inceste II: Artémis et Kyvéli
Montage de diapositives. Succession d’images immobiles. Retour au plan fixe. Maria et Katerina en surimpression d’identité. Artémis la chasseresse chassée. Kyvéli la mère/enfant qui dévore. Araignées qui tissent et déchirent. Identité à travers le corps, le visage, le geste, les objets, les secrets. Surimpressions signifiantes. "Tu m’as donné mon corps et moi je te donnerai le tien". Maria regarde (photographie) Katerina. Katerina regarde (photographie) Maria. Fusions, nœuds, mélanges des corps transparents. Actions INCESTE. Le rouge de la reine interdite.
Ces images, accompagnées de textes/ruptures, sont conçues pour une projection expanded avec un projecteur Super 8, un projecteur de diapositives à défilement manuel, un métronome et un micro. Il s’agit d’une tentative de briser les limites de la projection cinématographique habituelle, à travers un emploi transdisciplinaire de différents media.

M.K. - K.T., 1977

After five years of intense work on identity, an alchemical quest for the depths, after nine films and films / actions where the actresses’ gestures resounded against a black background which eliminated the environment to reveal the inside, taken outside: encounter of the inside with the outside.
Journey back into memory. Crossing the Greek landscape in August. The seas. The ruins, remains of abandoned houses, homes with holes, pierced by the wind, inside crossed by the outside. Unheimlich : the disturbing strangeness. Activation of a memory of origins. Unheimlich : what should remain secret, hidden and which manifests itself. MHTRIS = mother’s country.

Astarti, the Greek name for Ishtar, is an archetype of a deep, nocturnal feminine that emerges from subterranean darkness. We experience an embodied cinematic experience realised through a sensuous aesthetic as we are invited to enter a strange and uncertain world of inner depths and hypnotising effects. There, we encounter three women actantes, embodied by the artists, who play mythic and magical female figures such as Medusa and Salome. They metamorphose, dance and enter trances where the body vibrates into transformation. Figures reveal themselves out of silence which is both the moment of creation and an eternal reality. The film itself actualises that which is inactual and gives form to blackness through a poetics of intimacy and an ethics of interpersonal relationships, which is founded in the artists’ own double authorship.

The macrocosm present in QUASAR is a non colonized outer space. A non science-fictionalized outer space. It is a space of fantasized stars and galaxies, black holes and light particles. It is a space of hypnotic contemplation and dissociation of the subject from the self. Immersion into macrocosmic vibrations, rotations, contractions, into slow and curved time patterns. Non linear, non climactic time. Outer-inner skies.

Pioneers of French feminist cinematic avant-garde, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki began their rebellious and most innovative exploration of the female body and identity, going by the evocative name of Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body), in 1975 with the film-manifesto Double Labyrinthe.
The two artists film one another in a series of portraits aiming at the visualisation of the subconscious through mysterious rituals, calling upon Ancient Greek and Egyptian archetypes. This mesmeric and purely feminine representation, exclusively filtered by the female gaze, not only deeply destabilises the dominant female depiction in the film medium, but also goes on to subvert the relationship between “filmer” and filmed.
As a consequence, the viewer herself – or himself – is invited to a radically unusual kind of engagement with the images. Double Labyrinthe demands to let us, the audience, be carried and transformed by its hypnotic and ritualistic series of unconventional portraits.

This filmic portrait is born of a double movement: the meeting of Lena Vandrey with our cinematographic universe, our meeting with her pictorial world, her space and her collection of processional figures and articulated dolls. Crossings of imaginations, of mythologies: the South, the origins, the search for a “greecity”, the search for the magical potential of the image, the feminine one as “force in love”. Crossings of plastic gestures: one on canvas support, the other on photographic and filmic support. We invited the artist to become herself body-painting, filmed painting. We have staged her texts, her paintings, her objects, her space. Attempt to reveal it as an embodiment of its own mythology. ×