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.

Reel 1 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

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.

Professor Anatole Lacoste is having a meeting with one of the agents of doctor Brain at a Jackson Pollock exhibition at Centre Pompidou. Meanwhile, Deborah is about to take a bath when burglar Torlim Novak breaks into her house. Everything seems to be normal when the computer at the control station spots an anomaly in the way history functions. But how does one stop the film?

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.

All of history, that of Christ or any other, permeates the world, leaves its mark, modifying and informing history, and all that the human reproduces and creates. The best way for historical interpretation or literary adaptation is to move as far as possible from literal interpretation. That is, it is a contemporary and personal interpretation. The story of Christ is an archetypal story. It has modified and informed a morality and a vision of the human being in the West, it must be taken for what it is and what it has become: matter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

“Personal Statement” stages photographical treatments of the original medical document. The images unfold vertically while feminine hands (Katerina Thomadaki) try to stroke this mutant body. The off-screen voice (Maria Klonaris) talks to the photographed subject.

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.

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.

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.

No synopsis available yet.

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.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

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.

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.

Primarily a trilogy and a complementary work, or an experimental tetralogical cycle by Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, consisting of 4 films: Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue, Unheimlich II: Astarti, Kha Uebertragung - Les embaumées, and Unheimlich III: Les Mères.

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.

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.

No synopsis available yet.

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.

“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.

No synopsis available yet.

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

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

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

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

This film is made from the soundtrack of the multimedia installation/environment Mystère I: Sleeping Hermaphrodite that we created for the XII Biennale de Paris in 1982. The idea of ​​creating a second work, purely cinematographic this time - here, from the same soundtrack, seemed particularly stimulating since it poses in depth the question of the complex relationships between sound and image in a non-narrative context. MK - KT, 1985

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.

In "Falling. Desert. Syn" there is the body of repetition—not of tautology but of smooth resurrection; a body dying and being resurrected in a dance without suffering. A body of the desert, which is not deserted, but instead possessed by a force of attraction towards the sky, a force as strong as the one towards the earth. A body for the stars, the same one which plunges into the underworlds.

In "Falling. Desert. Syn" there is the body of repetition—not of tautology but of smooth resurrection; a body dying and being resurrected in a dance without suffering. A body of the desert, which is not deserted, but instead possessed by a force of attraction towards the sky, a force as strong as the one towards the earth. A body for the stars, the same one which plunges into the underworlds.

Portrait of Katerina Logotheton, grandmother of the filmmaker, two years before her death on 3 July 1973.

No synopsis available yet.

Portrait of the filmmaker’s mother in her garden. Part of the Portrait Series by Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki, the film was initially presented as an interlude during the multi-projection performance of Unheimlich III: Les Mères at Centre Pompidou in 1981.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

The film takes the Freudian concept of the uncanny generated by an inexplicable strangeness to expose the reappearance of the repressed feminine unconscious through splitting, doubling and mirroring the cinematic image to question the boundaries of the real. The late Maria Klonaris, who sadly passed away in the begining of 2014, with co-author Katerina Thomadaki, was responsible for some of the most radical womens' liberationist and transgender films and art ever created. Of Greek origin but based in Paris, Klonaris and Thomadaki were founders of the Cinema of the Body, a profound investigative practice into gender and bodily identity.