FLOWERBED
2025 | ongoing |installation |variable dimensions | drawings | soundscape | video | 3D printed and live plants | greenhouse Photo: Constantinos Koukias
Keywords: hybrid landscape, soundscape, garden, workshop, interspecies relationships, care
This work is a pseudo-ecosystem in itself—an ever-evolving cluster that is nourished and mutates with each workshop. A hybrid landscape that brings together essential elements for the survival of plant organisms in a post-catastrophic world. This “garden” functions as an open platform for information exchange, offering detailed observations on weed biology while inviting gestures of care and reflections on inter-species solidarity. Drawings, texts, soundscapes, video, 3D-printed plant forms, living vegetation, and gardening instructions compose a multi-sensory terrain. As technical guidance for sustaining life is narrated, visitors are invited to wander through the garden and engage with it both physically and imaginatively.
Installation components:
3D printed and live plants:
The garden alternates between living and printed forms. The process of collecting, scanning, and 3D printing functions as an informal herbarium, formed through the act of walking. Plant labels offer poetic care instructions — for ourselves, for the plants, for others.
Soundscape:
The soundscape includes field recordings from the urban environment and biodata sonification generated by living plants. Exposed speakers, cables, and power strips are integrated as structural components of the piece, evoking blossoms, branches, and roots that speak.
Gardening video:
Displayed on a tablet screen, the video invites visitors to scatter seeds — a gesture of planting weeds as an act of resistance and care. Simultaneously, it explores the nurturing function of underground networks in symbiotic plant organisms.
Greenhouse:
A small DIY greenhouse is placed within the installation, housing a few botany books and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana — a modest weed species widely used as a biological model in plant science. It commonly grows in fields and cracks in asphalt, often overlooked by city dwellers during their daily walks.
Collaborators: Eva Papanikolaou – theoretical support | Nikos Thomaidis – technical support (sound and biodata integration) | Fenia Rizou and studio ecolapsis – 3D technical artists|Katerina Karamanoli – scientific advisor, Professor at the School of Agriculture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
