Angela Melitopoulos

This video art piece creates a collage of the people, mechanisms, and advertisements in the transfer station of an underground train.

The video ‘Passing Drama’ reflects the acoustic image of Melitopoulos' family history. It tells the refugee story of her Greek family that came across three generations as a fragmentary and fairy-tale-like image. Flight as the fundamental motif of the story became the videographic theme of narrative, history and memory.

Crossings is a four-channel video and sixteen-channel sound installation shot in metallurgy plants in Lavrion and Skouries, Greece, as well as in refugee camps in Lesbos and Piraeus. It is a documentary work that engages with the social dimensions and historical continuities of the region’s economic and civil wars.

As part of the exhibition Critical Episodes (1957-2011). MACBA Collection, Level 2 of the Museum presents two new episodes of the MACBA Collection. One of these episodes is Déconnage, a video-essay by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato that looks at the life and work of the psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles (1912-1994). In Déconnage, one of the pioneers of critical psychiatry in post-war Europe is introduced. Anti-psychiatry is recovered here through the figure of Francesc Tosquelles: a discourse and practice that address not mental illnesses, but vital, social and ethical problems. Anti-psychiatry foresaw the dysfunctions that would eventually afflict people in contemporary societies.

An attempt to translate Walter Benjamin's theory "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man" into a montage using images from Tokyo's hightech amusement parks and artificial environments: precisely calculated acceleration and merry-go-round machines, sophisticated wave pools affecting bodies with promethic rhythms – how does the language of man and the language of things read in relation to the industrial development of hightech amusement parks and the calculability of sky-reaching affects? (Angela Melitopoulos) „There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents on language as such and on the language of man.“ (Walter Benjamin: "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man")