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
A hybrid landscape that gathers essential elements for the survival of plant organisms in a post-catastrophic world.
Flowerbed constitutes a pseudo-ecosystem – a dynamic and evolving assemblage that transforms through ongoing artistic research, site-specific encounters, and participatory processes. Each presentation takes a different form, responding to the characteristics of a place, the continuation of fieldwork, and the gradual accumulation of materials, observations, and relationships.
The project is activated through practices of walking, collecting, observing, scanning, gardening, and participatory workshops such as How to Grow Weeds, which invite participants to engage with spontaneous urban vegetation as a field of knowledge, coexistence, and care. The “garden” emerges as an open platform for exchange, offering observations on the biology of weeds while exploring forms of kinship and interdependence beyond anthropocentric frameworks. Drawings, texts, soundscapes, video, three-dimensional printed plant forms, living vegetation, and gardening instructions compose a multisensory field in which the natural and the artificial, the fragile and the resilient, cultivation and abandonment coexist.
The work proposes a garden not as a space of control but as a site of negotiation between species, where survival emerges through interdependencies, micro-practices of care, and open processes of transformation.
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 is composed of field recordings collected through walking in the city. Urban noise, feedback, and plant-generated signals are layered to create a shifting sonic environment. The sound does not represent the landscape but emerges from it, reflecting the intensity, instability, and rhythms of the urban condition.
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.
text: Maria Andrikopoulou
Concept, artistic research & installation: Maria Andrikopoulou
Collaborators: • Eva Papanikolaou – workshop co-development & theoretical contribution • Nikos Thomaidis – sound and biodata integration • Fenia Rizou and studio ecolapsis – 3D visualization and fabrication support