Invitation to Love
Invitation to Love combines day-to-day autobiographical images in ways that convey a cinematic experience, leading the viewer to question what separates reality from fiction. Storylines and plots are suggested but never resolved. A fragmented video diary in which each “episode” is treated as a short abstract poem during the editing process.
12 channel video, Mini DV, 2004-2017
The Investigation
Interestingly enough, the work shaped up when the artist unexpectedly got arrested as a terrorist suspect while filming around Tegel airport. The police confiscated the tape he was using at the time – the 12th and last tape of an ongoing project – and sent it to the German Secret Service for examination. Apparently the material found on it must have convinced them of some suspect activity because they summoned him for interrogation only a few days later. Previous to that “incident”, Loukakos had explored the city of Berlin from side to side for four months, searching and waiting for extraordinary things to happen in the most ordinary moments and places. After his release, the memory of the interrogation naturally came to be the film’s scenario and guided the editing of all the filmed material he had already gathered. The film playfully questions representation and power while showing the uncertain limits between image and fact.
23:20 minutes, Mini DV, 2012
alpha
Drawing from surrealism, film noir and the contemporary database esthetics, alpha is a hard-to-follow road movie where faces and places merge in a strange plot and words and images collaborate to get the traveler/spectator as disoriented as possible.
A play on cinematic and perceptual conventions, this work was for us* a way of trying to drive the impossibility of narrative to its extreme, where the conscious and the unconscious experience meet in a fiction that imitates genres while undermining them at the same time. How we communicate and transport ourselves in time and space, both mentally and physically, could be the topic of this long adventure, which is filmed in the Netherlands, France and Greece.
A play on cinematic and perceptual conventions, this work was for us* a way of trying to drive the impossibility of narrative to its extreme, where the conscious and the unconscious experience meet in a fiction that imitates genres while undermining them at the same time. How we communicate and transport ourselves in time and space, both mentally and physically, could be the topic of this long adventure, which is filmed in the Netherlands, France and Greece.
Extracts 7:17 minutes from alpha 58 minutes, Mini DV, 2006
Scrambling
Scrambling is an initial study on human time and its perception from the standing point of a lonely observer. It uses the vocabulary of a road movie, but is rather a roam movie, meant to be projected in dark rooms. All material is found during trips in different cities of Europe. Nothing in the initial material is staged, no actors are involved and the (visual) narration is not the result of a script but rather the fruit of the editing procedure. The film deploys a state of waiting and void alongside with fast-moving sequences and unexpected incidents. Time as duration where here can just as well be nowhere, where everything withdraws in its own image. In Scrambling, it is time which organizes space as the scenes succeed one another in a journey of meditation on the uncannyness of (filmed) reality.
27:45 minutes, Mini DV, 2004
