The Image and the Story

Abstract

Stefanos Tsivopoulos's gravitation toward history and the media began in 2006 with the video installation Play, which documents five young actors performing scenes taken from several news images, including photographs from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Shocked by the youngsters' often brutal response toward their improvised roles, Tsivopoulos began to further his investigation into the media. media has always been using 'images' and 'narratives' to tell their stories, but we should not forget that the image is an invention and product of the arts, Tsivopoulos explains, an assertion that is clearly translated in the trilogy Real The Story The Storyteller (2010)--made up of three video works: The Interview (2007), Untitled (The Remake) (2007), and Untitled (In Plato's Cave) (2008), in which Tsivopoulos deconstructs news reporting via film works that look at the documentation of events, revealing realities brutally edited into digestible segments for mass consumption. Tsivopoulos engages in a meticulous process of archiving and reenactment, using the original equipment and sets, while nodding to the original direction taken from news media--from dictatorship Greece to the constructed nature of a BBC interview. Through this process, film production becomes an act of sculpture. Through reenactments, Tsivopoulos turns our socially constructed notions of historical events inside out in order to better understand them. Images, like any other systematic language, contain information as well as knowledge, he notes as we settle down to discuss his work in an apartment in central Athens on May 13, 2011. I'm interested in obtaining the knowledge from them rather than the In doing so, Tsivopoulos reveals the dirty truth behind the stylized reality where history, war, and politics become entertainment; objectified by the constructs of representation as defined by the mediated image. STEPHANIE BAILEY: Has your work always reflected on how political information and conflict news is disseminated via media images? STEFANOS TSIVOPOULOS: Yes, with the exception of Lost Monument [which follows the journey of Harry S. Truman's statue as it is transported through Greece and Turkey by two local farmers ignorant of its identity and political and historical significance], the only piece that focuses on history or the denial of history. But it falls outside of the core principles of my work based in the ideas of representation through the image. It has a very personal take because it was on my mind since I was a student in Athens. I bumped into Truman's monument a couple of times. I didn't know what it was and what it represented so I read the plaque and got the information. It worked like a caption. With the film, I wanted to create something different in terms of creating a piece that would really use cinematic vocabulary. In terms of structure, I was more interested in these sub-stories within the general story that relate to a particular period or a particular political situation or condition--[which brings] history more directly to Greek society and politics. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] SB: The 1947 Truman Doctrine was a bailout package designed for Greece and Turkey and paved the way for the Marshall Plan, which introduced the reconstruction of Western Europe after the economic devastation brought on by World War II. Seeing the Truman monument as a reduction of a major historical event with roots in a violent, global conflict, it becomes an object that will inevitably become distilled to a commodity in a distracted society. This denotes our own disconnection to the narratives that often define and drive collective culture. ST: It's quite striking. Working on this piece I also wanted to break away from media conventions and this idea of the mediated image--which, for me, had become an institution by itself. I tried to find different ways of dealing with this notion of the image and how you can load an image with different thoughts. …