We are delighted to welcome Greek filmmaker and writer Constantinos Hadzinikolaou to Ghent for a live Super 8 film performance.
Born in Athens in 1974, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou presents an unusual case. As an artist, he inhabits the intermediate space between cinema and literature; or rather, he inhabits both spaces simultaneously, with equal intensity and a need to escape the bounds of both. As a filmmaker, he shoots fleeting silent “documentaries” without scenario on Super 8, and he creates images that seem suspended outside the flow of time. As a writer, he crafts texts of various lengths, abstract and precise, in language that is direct, almost oral, clean, often raw. He departs from an existing story, real or fictive, and becomes a kind of forger: he entangles the real with the imaginary, the political with the everyday and the personal, so that dream states becomes part of reality and reality part of his narrative. Hadzinikolaou’s work was shown at Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens.
Hadzinikolaou’s invitation is part of Greek filmmaker Konstanza Kapsali’s doctoral research at LUCA School of Arts. Kapsali’s work is strongly rooted in her background in archaeology. After completing her studies, she conducted archaeological and ethnographic research in Greece, Turkey, and the Netherlands. Her practice draws on observational cinema, sensory ethnography, and the archaeological metaphor. Her thematic focus varies, but the notions of memory, femininity, the sense of belonging, nostalgia and the unravelling of history are often recurrent. In the afternoon, Kapsali organizes the symposium We Can Never Put the Past Back Together Again in the Way that Memory Promises at Kunsthal Gent, where Rebecca Jane Arthur will also be giving an artist’s talk on her film Hit Him on the Head with a Hard Heavy Hammer (2023).
- Program and introduction: Konstanza Kapsali
- In collaboration with LUCA School of Arts Gent
