Maria Klonaris

Portrait of Katerina in a hotel room by the sea. Her sunglasses reflect her body and Maria’ s camera in the mirror, thus revealing, albeit in a fragment, the relational principle of their cinema and of their double self-portraits. A constellation of stars crosses her skin. Everything is as blue as the sea and the universe. In this metamorphic alchemy, microcosm and macrocosm intertwine.

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.

In 1976, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki direct with the Collectif 010 in La Cartoucherie in Vincennes a 48-hour action, Torture, which is recorded on tape by Jean Roualdès. In 2012, after the digitization of the original video tapes by the Bibliothèque Nationale of France for the Klonaris/Thomadaki Archive, the two artists proceed to a reinterpretation of this document, highlighting the characteristics of the 1/2-inch video format. This video is a trace of a public performance, where bodies, even under constraint, blinded and gagged, manifest their protest power against coercion. This performance against torture is one of the first examples of the art of the body theorized by the two artists.

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.

Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.

"Pulsar" belongs to "The Angel Cycle" ("Le Cycle de l´Ange"). In this cycle of works we create bonds between the human body and astronomical bodies. Maria Klonaris´ improvised performance is a negative dance which lies between pleasure and catastrophe, a black and blue body language which grapples with the white of the screen and the luminous suddenness of a firework display.

SMOKING is a brief portrait of Maria Klonaris composed of seven shots. Katerina Thomadaki completed it in 2016, two years after Maria Klonaris' passing, from rushes shot in 1975 at the time of the filming of DOUBLE LABYRINTHE. The Greek word that appears at the beginning of the film, μετείκασμα, signifies "meta-image" and refers to retinal persistence.

With this film-manifesto, the two artists invent what they called the Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body), they present themselves as a "double auteur femme" and they lay the foundations of the radical critical and esthetical positions of their work to come. Double Labyrinthe has a mirror structure based on their "mutual gaze": in the first part Katerina performs while filmed by Maria and in the second part Maria performs filmed by Katerina.

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.

Flash Passion is one of the very first films that the two artists made in Athens when they took up the super-8 camera and extended their theatre practice towards cinema. Here, Maria Klonaris looks at/films Katerina Thomadaki.

Angel Scan. "Trip" – but without substances – except the substances created by the brain when energy awakes as a creative conscience, accompanied by an intense experience of "light" and "darkness". Hustle and bustle, bombing of atoms, dance of electric particles animated of an ultra fast movement.Invisible units of infra-atomic energy, forms/colours which are characterized by their irradiating heat and by their attraction strength as well as their potential of sound/ vibratory energy.

He tells me that his name is Sauro Bellini, a Bellini descendant, that he is twenty-two years old, that he studies maths, that he does not like to be photographed, much less to be filmed. He tells me that he has nothing to do with cinema, that he actually hates cinema - too violent for him. I invite him to a projection of my portrait film Isa en automne, which screens at "Studio 43" the next day, "... then we'll talk about it again ...". He comes to the screening, he likes the movie, he says OK. The next afternoon at the Jardin des Plantes for the shoot, he comes. He is here before the hour. Few words exchanged, almost everything goes through the eyes. He gives himself to my camera. He concentrates and he abandons himself. He becomes Sauro Bellini, angel of Venice .

The film revolves around three notions: Kha = the etheric double according to ancient Egyptians. Perpetual specter in all respects resembling the physical body of a dead person. Uebertragung = transfer. Phenomenon by which an emotional state experienced for one object is extended to another by an association. Identification. Projection. Moving from one order of things to another. Embalming = filling a corpse with balsamic, desiccating and antiseptic substances to preserve them. Fill with a sweet smell. Perfume.

Video of the installation "XYXX Mosaic Identity" (Offenes Kulturhaus - Linz, 1994).

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.

The child points to the Secret. For what do we see? A blindfolded Renaissance figure of the In Between (in between the sexes, in between the worlds). The well suggests the Underground (Water). The crypt as well (Earth). Underground matrix. La Puerta del Angel: a meditation space. M. K. - K. T. Madrid 1992

After the semantic body (Double Labyrinth) and the libidinal body (L'enfant qui a pissé des paillettes, Soma) we are dealing here with another theme: that of the painful body or, more precisely, the memory of the body in relation to pain lived.

“Requiem pour le XXè siècle” is a manifesto against war. It is an elegy. The photograph is connected with images that are part of our collective memory: extracts from newsreels of World War II that have been reworked and transformed through various optical and electronic processes. World War II was a condensation of violence (biological and environmental destructions, racism, ethnic clearing, and persecution of people who are different…) and ongoing wars perpetuate that violence. This work is a metaphorical representation of all past, present and future wars. Constructed on the dramatic tension between the violence of wars and the presence of the intersex hermaphroditic “Angel”: Their eyes are bandaged; they are a symbol for difference, having an ambiguous position: observer, witness, victim or judge.

The female universe through four female characters: a child, a prostitute who never appears, me and the other, the other and me. Inside. The texts: invasion of the female exterior.

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.

An echoing, nocturnal, elliptical text. Female voices speak it. Fragments of music punctuate and suspend the images. The text says the transformation of the hero into a woman during his sleep. Games of inverted masks, transvestites, transparency of the frontiers of the sexes. Self-representations. Black and white visions clouded with magenta and cyan. Fields, positives, negatives, degrees of grey, light textures. A device made up of screens and projectors, still images and moving images, the projection surface multiplied. Water, bare trees, light trails, a gun, tigers.