Loukia-Alavanou-2023-140X148-English-for-web

The Green Room Single-Channel Stereoscopic Animation, 16:9 Both in theatre and in film, a "green room" is a space "in between": while in theatre it serves as the place where actors switch between Ego and Other, in cinema it is used as a "no-space." The stereoscopic collage-like film The Green Room explores the metaphorical "no-space," which belongs neither to the blue nor to the red filter of the stereoscope. The film consists of self-shot images of the young Flemish painter Birde Vanheerswynghels filmed on the green screen, assembled with "cut- out" images of the Victorian interiors of 1950s British films. The expressionist set design of the domineering little old lady’s house in the 1955 film The Ladykillers has often been seen as the "outsider's" viewpoint of postwar England at a time when the country, faced with sociopolitical changes and austerity, attempted to suppress its Colonial past from its collective memory. While echoing similar social and economic shifts that are taking place in today’s Europe, The Green Room makes an allegory between the "external gaze" of the stereoscope’s viewer and the "outsider’s threat" that Europe is currently preoccupied with. An ambiguous dialogue made up of cinematic voices between a "stranger/guest" and their "host" misleads and manipulates. The claustrophobic Victorian house interiors, seen through the stereoscope, serve as "traps" in the Hitchcockian sense, both for the character embodied by Vanheerswynghels, and for the viewer herself. Loukia Alavanou