An Eco – sensory workshop, Visual and Applied Arts at the School of Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , Thessaloniki, GR
In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway invites us to remain with diculty, to abandon both apocalyptic narratives of collapse and techno-utopian solutions. In their place, she proposes speculative fabulation: a mode of storytelling that emerges from kinships, from unpredictable, mutual entanglements of species, practices, and places. These stories do not narrate a world yet to come; they perform a world in the making, through interpenetrations, complexities, and practices of care.
Within this framework, the unruly growths we encounter on urban fringes, in the cracks of the city fabric, along sidewalks, and at the abandoned edges of plots are not marginal organisms nor unwanted “mistakes” of the landscape. They are companion species, carriers of stories interwoven with our own.
As D. Haraway notes in the Companion Species Manifesto, the species that coexist with us are not passive companions but co-creators of worlds (world-makers). Even the wild plants we refer to as “weeds” actively participate in shaping the urban ecosystem, challenging the human impulse toward control and uniformity.
Flowerbed by Maria Andrikopoulou likewise constitutes a performative exercise in worlding: a process through which the material, the vegetal, the human, and the technological co-produce place. It is a place where the weed is not a problem but a kin, where the suburb is not a margin but a symbiotic node, and where survival does not depend on control but on collective care.
The workshop invites us to imagine together a new map—not one of roads, plots, and industrial edges, but of stories of cohabitation, invented species of weeds, topographies of empathy, and spatial practices that generate a place capable of “staying with the trouble” and transforming it into a rich, hybrid ecosystem.
text: Eva Papanikolaou