The distance between the staircase and the sky
2022 7’ stereo
The film’s imagery is created through a process combining walking, performance, and photogrammetry, made on-foot and by-hand. The spoken poem that runs through the film derived from an AR exchange between an animator and a poet: a postcard sent from a tropical holiday, as imagined during a walk to work. ‘The distance between the staircase and the sky’ is a way to evoke a sense of place from walking, so that a short film may become a space of meaningful connections for those who attend it.
Synopsis:
Ascending a staircase in the centre of Athens makes room for reflection on everyday life, as both otherworldly and mundane. On a planet lit by neon and on a beach powered by cicadas, we twirl into a void measured by walking - one step at a time.
Credits:
A film by Katerina Athanasopoulou
Poem: Sotiris Koutsoukos
Voice: Emma Swinn
Score: Savvas Metaxas
One-minute trailer
Awards:
Honourable mention, Midwest Video Poetry Fest, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. October 2023.
Screenings:
Window Display / Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. January-February 2023.
Tampere Film Festival, Finland. March 2023.
Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, USA. June 2023.
Video Miden, Kalamata, Greece. July 2023.
Bolton Film Festival, Bolton, UK. September 2023.
Animasyros Festival, Syros, Greece. September 2023.
‘The distance between the staircase and the sky’ (2022) and ‘Polykatoikia:Peripatos’ (2022) were screened at the 3D3 Legacy Exhibition Digital Flow/s: interdisciplinary digital arts and humanities practice-based research, at Sparks, Bristol. September 2023.
Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin. October 2023.
Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival, Wellington, New Zealand. November 2023.
London Short Film Festival, London. January 2024.
Internationl Poetry Film Festival, Los Angeles, April 2024.
FIG Festival, Sofia, Bulgaria, part of Girls in Film special screening, June 2024.
BRIT SHORTS, Berlin, January 2025
The film was created as part of my doctoral research, and you can find more information here
A flock of birds circles and moves a cage vehicle, seeking escape from a city half finished and abandoned, with roads interrupted by fragments of fallen statues.
Apodemy
2012Apodemy from Katerina Athanasopoulou on Vimeo.
Commissioned by The Onassis Cultural Center on the theme of Emigration for Visual Dialogues 2012Plato likens the human soul with a cage, where knowledge is birds flying. We’re born with the cage empty and, as we grow, we collect birds and they go in the cage for future use. When we need to access knowledge we put our hand in the cage, hunt for a bird – and sometimes catch the wrong one.
Ornithology uses the term “Zugunruhe” to describe the turbulent behaviour of birds before they migrate, whether free or caged.
These two images, birds inhabiting the human soul and the distress of the migrating bird became the starting points for this film, commissioned on the theme of Emigration.
A flock of birds circles and moves a cage vehicle, seeking escape from a city half finished and abandoned, with roads interrupted by fragments of fallen statues. Those hands are simultaneously the pursuit of knowledge and also the heroes/leaders of the past that we have rejected but are still haunting us.
In a time when Europe seems to be imploding, this is my portrait of Athens.
Credits
A film by Katerina Athanasopoulou
Original Music by Jon Opstad
Violin: Claire Wheeler
Commisioned by the Onassis Cultural Center for Visual Dialogues 2012
Awards
Winner of the Lumen Prize 2013
Finalist, Best Commissioned Animation, British Animation Awards 2014
Best Animation, London Greek Film Festival, October 2013
Special Mention for a Greek Film, Animasyros International Festival, Greece, September 2013
Nominated for the Peer Raben Music Award at SoundTrack_Cologne 10, Germany 2013
Screenings
Filmessay at Archine, Brazil, 2016
Filmessay/E.V.A at Paris College of Art, France, 2016
E.V.A (Experimental Video Architecture), Venice Architecture Biennale, 2016
Special Screening, Strangloscope Video Art Festival, Brazil, December 2014
Lumen Show at the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, November 2014
Festival Miden, Greece, July 2014
The Queen of Hungary, Landscape: Dislocation /Space / Place, UK, May 2014.
Public Choice Awards Screening, British Animation Awards, BFI, February 2014
London Short Film Festival, January 2014
Winter Shuffle, London, December 2013
Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, November 2013
Underwire Festival, London, November 2013
KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival, Holland, November 2013
Shnit International Short film festival, Switzerland, October 2013
Belo Horizonte International Film Festival, Brazil, September 2013
Animasyros Festival, Greece, September 2013
The Queen of Hungary, Landscape: Dislocation /Space / Place, UK, Spring 2014.
Femina Film Festival, Brazil, July 2013
Athens Video Art Festival, Athens, June 2013
Hong Kong Art Fair, Animation Club Screening, May 2013
MAshRome Film Fest, Rome, May 2013
60th Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival, Serbia, April 2013
Skepto International Film Festival, Sardinia, April 2013
Holland Animation Festival, Utrecht, March 2013
Flatpack Festival, Birmingham Museum & Gallery, UK, March 2013
Visual Dialogues (Installation), Plato's Academy Park, December 2012 - February 2013
WAVES
2024 4’35’ stereoA film by Katerina Athanasopoulou
Score: Savvas Metaxas
Edit: Ian Clark
Synopsis
An alien woman responds to a half-forgotten message of interplanetary friendship. A film about communication, and the fingers that stir the digital.
Created in response to WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARS, MOMus, Thessaloniki, Dec 2024 - Feb 2025. Curator: Domna Gounari
Director’s Statement
In 1972, the space probe Pioneer 10 was launched from Cape Canaveral, heading to Jupiter as part of the first reconnaissance of the Solar System. A gold-anodised aluminium plate was attached to it, named ‘Pioneer Plaque’, with an engraving designed by Carl Sagan. It features a naked human couple: a woman stands next to a man raising his hand into a human greeting; next to them is a diagram showing Earth’s position, a pulsar map that forms part of a precious space postcard. What if this ‘wish you were here’ message was indeed heard by Aliens? The film imagines an alien woman waving back, on her own Earth mission.
When thinking about the digital, much emphasis is put on code as an intangible power that occludes its manual origins: from ‘digitus’ which is Latin for ‘finger’, the digital has been from the start powered by human gestures - it measures, palpates, and stirs our instruments and our imaginations.
In times captured by AI utopias and dystopias, this film is made by (and for) human bodies; my keyboard and mouse are my Animator’s tools that I manipulate with my own digits, and I play my computer like a musical instrument.
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An alien woman responds to a half-forgotten message of interplanetary friendship. A film about communication, and the fingers that stir the digital.
Created in response to WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARS, MOMus, Thessaloniki, Dec 2024 - Feb 2025. Curator: Domna Gounari
Director’s Statement
In 1972, the space probe Pioneer 10 was launched from Cape Canaveral, heading to Jupiter as part of the first reconnaissance of the Solar System. A gold-anodised aluminium plate was attached to it, named ‘Pioneer Plaque’, with an engraving designed by Carl Sagan. It features a naked human couple: a woman stands next to a man raising his hand into a human greeting; next to them is a diagram showing Earth’s position, a pulsar map that forms part of a precious space postcard. What if this ‘wish you were here’ message was indeed heard by Aliens? The film imagines an alien woman waving back, on her own Earth mission.
When thinking about the digital, much emphasis is put on code as an intangible power that occludes its manual origins: from ‘digitus’ which is Latin for ‘finger’, the digital has been from the start powered by human gestures - it measures, palpates, and stirs our instruments and our imaginations.
In times captured by AI utopias and dystopias, this film is made by (and for) human bodies; my keyboard and mouse are my Animator’s tools that I manipulate with my own digits, and I play my computer like a musical instrument.
Deep Waters
2020 Site-specific animation installation, three screens and sound.
Score by Savvas Metaxas
With thanks to Bill Psarras
Primarolia festival in Aigio, Greece, is an annual art festival that celebrates the 19th century boat journeys towards the ports of Europe, carrying Corinthian raisins - Greece’s “black gold”. This year’s theme was ‘Images of a Floating World’ (ukiyo-e), where the mobility and fluidity of everyday life get reinterpreted through the new reality of the 2020 pandemic.
Artist’s statement from 2020
In these pandemic days, the journeys that we once took for granted are being tested and rewritten. Having plotted the attic of the exhibition space through the feet of a remote walker, I assembled a photogrammetry model and took my own steps within the digitally transmitted space, which is now virtual but no less real. The installation evokes a new underwater interpretation of the building, and the three screens act as portals into this alternative-yet-familiar space, pierced by a long trailing ribbon drawing its own choreography. The serpentine writing of the digital trail can be seen by the mobile, peripatetic viewer as they perform their own perambulation around the screens, each one revealing a view of the virtual space between them.
About the process:
With the pandemic lockdown forbidding me to travel to Aigio in person, I was introduced to the building that houses the Primarolia festival through a set of screens: the curator and the artistic director led me via video calls through the old warehouse that once stored raisins, walking from the ground floor up to the attic. This room immediately captivated me, with its wooden and metal roof seeming like an upside-down ship hold. My original plan had been to perform a ‘camera-walk’ which allows me to process an area through a kind of procession, capturing the room in an immersive video, which I later rework into a photogrammetric model. Unable to be there, I passed the digital batton to Bill Psarras, who performed the ‘camera-walk’ for me and then sent me the material through digital transfer, hundreds of frames traveling over the sea - like images of a floating world (ukiyo-e) that the exhibition is named after.
The photogrammetric models that I extracted out of the material allowed me to walk the set, in VR and also through my computer screen in London. I reimagined the attic as a sunken ship or a flooded building, with tiny floating debris embodying the multiple travel trajectories that we have somehow left behind, next to the seaweed that has taken over. After exploring the entire photogrammetric attic through my computer screen, I placed within it digital cameras that recorded their view of the animation; the three resulting films were screened in television sets in the real attic in Aigio, positioned where the virtual cameras had been. A red ribbon enters and leaves the space, like Ariadne’s thread defining the room via its own choreography. The score by Savvas Metaxas places the peripatetic viewer of Deep Waters under an atmosphere of intense yet tranquil pressure, underwater, in anticipation of “the great crashing of the waves upon the standing ships” in the words of Embeirikos.
Katerina Athanasopoulou is a Greek artist-researcher living in London who creates animated films for cinema and gallery space. She studied Fine Art at Aristotle University in Greece, and graduated with an MA Animation from the Royal College of Art. Her award-winning films have been shown internationally at film festivals and galleries, including Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Tampere Film Festival, Thessaloniki Biennale 3, Holland Animation Film Festival, Zebra Poetry Film Festival, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. She has created films for Channel 4, London College of Fashion, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and she won the Lumen Prize in 2013 with her short film Apodemy.
Selected works include: WAVES (2024), a film about communication and the fingers that stir the digital; The distance between the staircase and the sky (2022), a short poetry film that reimagines Athens as a newly-discovered planet; Deep Waters (2020), a site-specific animation installation commissioned by Primarolia Festival, Her Voice (2019), commisioned by AUDINT for their Unsound:Undead show at Arebyte, London; Branches of Life (2016), commissioned by Cast Iron Radio and Recording for the Body Of Songs project, supported by Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England; Apodemy (2012), a short film on Emigration and the Economic Crisis, commissioned by the Onassis Foundation; Engine Angelic (2010) for Animate Projects. Katerina also collaborates with other artists on short films, documentaries and installations.
Katerina is a Tutor (Research) within the MA Animation at the Royal College of Art. Prior to this position she taught extensively within University of the Arts London and Westminster University, and has been a guest lecturer at Kingston University, Middlesex University and Goldsmiths. She completed her doctoral research with Plymouth University, on the intersections of documentary, VR, and AR, through the lens of animation.
Selected works include: WAVES (2024), a film about communication and the fingers that stir the digital; The distance between the staircase and the sky (2022), a short poetry film that reimagines Athens as a newly-discovered planet; Deep Waters (2020), a site-specific animation installation commissioned by Primarolia Festival, Her Voice (2019), commisioned by AUDINT for their Unsound:Undead show at Arebyte, London; Branches of Life (2016), commissioned by Cast Iron Radio and Recording for the Body Of Songs project, supported by Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England; Apodemy (2012), a short film on Emigration and the Economic Crisis, commissioned by the Onassis Foundation; Engine Angelic (2010) for Animate Projects. Katerina also collaborates with other artists on short films, documentaries and installations.
Katerina is a Tutor (Research) within the MA Animation at the Royal College of Art. Prior to this position she taught extensively within University of the Arts London and Westminster University, and has been a guest lecturer at Kingston University, Middlesex University and Goldsmiths. She completed her doctoral research with Plymouth University, on the intersections of documentary, VR, and AR, through the lens of animation.