Original concept by Delaine Le Bas & Damian James Le Bas
Animation Katerina Athanasopoulou
Sound Tim Harrison
Photography Damian James Le Bas
Original artworks Delaine Le Bas

An Animate Projects commission supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

CHUVIHONI looks at the places where memories live – in this case, within Britain’s Romani Gypsy culture.

The departure point was a belief that in Gypsy culture, as in others, collective memory is retained through the interrelationship of four phenomena: past places, past persons; present spaces, present persons. The challenge was to create a sense of these ‘memory spaces’ in the form of a film: a multi-disciplinary, multi-creator approach was essential in order to do justice to the nature of collective memory.

A recording of artist Delaine Le Bas in conversation with her grandmother, alongside footage by Damian James Le Bas of traditional Romani stopping places in Hampshire, formed the spine of the piece. Sound designer Tim Harrison used binaural recording techniques in past and present memory ‘sites’: the recordings were then played through speakers in a 3D environment, which could be physically walked through with microphones to add further layers to the soundscape. Animator Katerina Athanasopoulou used a combination of scans of Delaine’s artworks and family photographs to integrate animated elements into the filmed footage, creating not just an enhanced sense of the physical and historical ‘depth’ of the images, but a wholly original representation of Romani memory and place.

Katerina Athanasopoulou is an animation artist living and working in London.

She studied Painting at the Aristotle University in Greece and completed an Animation MA at the Royal College of Art in London.

Her short films are a hybrid of live action and animation, forming richly layered worlds with a strong feel for colour and texture: video, photographs and animation coming together in a process akin to alchemy, embracing chance and experimentation.

Her work has been screened in international film festivals and art galleries, including Thessaloniki Biennale 3, Istanbul Modern, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Channel 4 and others.

Tim Harrison is a sound designer, filmmaker and tinkerer. He runs Aumeta, a company specialising in feature film audio post (most recently Sus and Keith Lemon: The Film) and commercial sound design (clients include Adidas, Mulberry and Nokia). Tim regularly works with director Luke Losey: results include the experimental microshorts The Promise and 'i'- for which he won the International Sound Design Prize at the 2007 Hamburg Film Festival- and collaborations with Damon Albarn on The Boy in the Oak and Phil Hartnoll (Orbital).

Tim is a member of filmmaking collective Studio Murmur. Work includes the butoh inspired pieces Dreamt in Flesh and ¼”, and music videos for the likes of DJ Shadow and Kwes. In 2013 Tim produced the 'LaLaLa' video for Naughty Boy, which has received over 250 million Youtube hits, winning a MOBO for Best Video and a UK Music Video Award for Best New Artist. A current focus is on interactive videos and installations. In 2012 Tim co-directed Helioscope, following the earlier interactive video experiment The Adelphi. Past installations include Synaesthete, a Java-based cymatics system.