Iconic images from childhood cartoons and film occupy a particular place: as shared and repeated, they are anonymous products, yet at the same time nothing can be more personal, as they mark moments from our early lives, lending a form to aspects of our histories that may be too difficult to remember. Emerging sexualities, rivalries, broken romances and violence, after all, are the latent texts of childhood cinema. And these are the building blocks of Loukia Alavanou’s work. Alavanou’s practice involves visual and acoustic collage. She takes elements from usually well-known movies, together with static images from personal and social sources, and subjects them to a dramatic choreography. Often emerging from an intense black background, the images move with a startling vitality and colour, and as we watch them we experience an unsettling reversal: charm becomes terror, hope becomes despair and clarity becomes confusion. Acoustically, there is a parallel process: the continuity of sound becomes discontinuity, and the beauty of a perfectly pitched human voice becomes stark and tragic. Sound cuts, divides and invades. Strange intrusions punctuate both the visual and acoustic threads, indexing a reality much closer to ourselves than what the products of popular culture apparently convey. Alavanou uses the very material designed to protect us from what is most real as a means to articulate and perhaps transmit it. —Darian Leader
The book Krazy Kut. A Case Without a Body by Loukia Alavanou was published by Cube Art Editions and Aeschylia Festivall 2011 on the occasion of the exhibition Episodio 3 at the Leonidas Kanellopoulos Cultural Centre of the City of Elefsina, in September 2011.
