In The Wild

Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou

Artwork Description:

In The Wild is a single-channel video installation that unfolds through a living aquatic ecosystem and an 18-minute multimedia film. Premiered at the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale, the work creates a walk-through wetland environment where visitors enter a winding path, move through vegetation, smell, touch, listen, and watch the film from within the ecosystem. The environment forms an ecological niche inspired by the wetlands where the film was shot: Kalochori Wetland near Thessaloniki, the protected Axios Delta, and Ballona Wetlands in Los Angeles. Designed and created with my mother, landscape architect Despoina Sarakinioti, the garden draws from sustainable planting practices and the New Perennial Movement, bringing together aquatic plants, red clay, water, gravel, and dense vegetation that moves softly with air. The plants come from Gryllis Water Lilies, an Attica nursery and botanical park dedicated to protecting and propagating resilient aquatic species. This collaboration grounds the work’s ethics of care in cultivation, preservation, and ecological responsibility. Shot across wetlands and robotic laboratories in Greece and Los Angeles, the film brings together poetry, collage, robotic advertisements, and performances by human, humanoid, and quadruped bodies. The choice to film robotic technologies on 16mm was central to the process, bringing robots into contact with slowness, fragility, waiting, grain, and analogue glitch. This unstable medium required attention and care, making the process itself part of the work’s ethics and a quiet resistance to techno-capitalist narratives of optimization, control, speed, and extraction.

Project Collaborators:

Performers: Anna-Maria Velentza ( PhD, Human-Robot Interaction) Mochi Georgiou Landscape and Planting Design: Despoina Sarakinioti Aquatic Plant Consultant: Giannis Gryllis On-Site Planting: by Despoina Sarakinioti, Giannis Gryllis, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou Cinematography: Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, David De Rozas, Kleitos Kyriakides Quadruped Robot Operation: Huntrezz Janos Music Composition and Sound Design: Aliki Leftherioti Produced at The Center For Ethnographic Media Arts, University of Southern California Supported by iMAP USC Media Arts & Practice Filmed at LIRES - lab of Informatics and Robotics in Education and Society, The Ballona Wetlands, Kalochori Wetland Commissioned by MOMUS - Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art - everything must change RIS9 Curated by Nadja Argyropoulou Plants Sponsored by Gryllis Water Lilies