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, open assemblage that evolves through the participatory workshop How to Grow Weeds, a performative process of collecting, observing, and re-signifying spontaneous urban plant growth. The “garden” emerges as an open platform for knowledge and exchange, offering observations on the biology of weeds while exploring forms of coexistence, kinship, and care 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 from the urban environment, interwoven with biodata sonification generated by living plants (weeds). It also includes a narrated excerpt from Lynn Margulis’ text, as quoted by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble, along with selected fragmentary words and phrases
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 dialogue and co-design of participatory workshops • Nikos Thomaidis – sound and biodata integration • Fenia Rizou and studio ecolapsis – – 3D visualization and fabrication support • Katerina Karamanoli, Professor at the School of Agriculture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – scientific consultation