We recently connected with Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou and have shared our conversation below.

Antigoni, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

So many! Every artistic project I create is the result of love, collaboration, and friendship. I will share two that played a crucial role in my artistic research and practice.

Fluffy Library (2018-2019) was the project that introduced me as an emerging artist in the Greek art scene, but beyond that, it taught me so much about myself and my community. .Fluffy Library is a project that highlights my research interests in the radical potentialities of softness and on how it can embrace spaces of togetherness, community building and radical pedagogies.
It was a participatory installation/ subversive library with soft sculptural elements, books and a curation of workshops, performances, and events in collaboration with other artists, educators and people from the queer community of Athens.
The story behind is that Fluffy; an ageless, gender-fluid, and symbiotic creature had occupied the neoclassic Athenian building of Atopos CVC.
Fluffy constituted a hybrid soft platform at the heart of Athens for queer reading, experimental collective storytelling, radical softness and infinite cuddle-puddles.

Fluffy became a platform for diffraction, where multiple subjectivities intertwined and resonated with each other. It became a shared space of collective experience, with everyone barefoot and lying down, gathered on the floor. It was a place for intimate connections—among families, dates, and communities.

The workshops realised in Fluffy were curated by me and organized in collaboration with educators, activists and queer collectives.
Workshops such as the first “Drag for Kids” workshop in Greece by Let’s Be Unicorns, with four Athenian drag queens, bringing together children between the ages of 4-8 and their parents to explore themes of inclusion, self-expression, acceptance, empathy, and coexistence through interactive drag performances and puppetry shows.
In 2019, Fluffy Library traveled to Bristol’s Arnolfini Museum of Contemporary Arts, where it presented a series of events alongside the sculptural installation in collaboration with Bristol’s artistic and queer communities.

While I was pursuing my MFA degree in Media Arts at UCLA, I did a performance titled “BB the Pet Robot” (2023). The performance was about how softness and the glitch can create space for more complicated relationships between humans and non human entities. BB explored, failed, danced and played with the edges, limits and the transformative potentialities of affective technologies when seen and felt through the lenses of affect and queer feminist theory.
BB explores the boundaries, limits, ethics, and transformative potential of affective computation when viewed through the lenses of affect and queer theory. My approach is deeply rooted in the recognition of emotions as not merely individual experiences but as collective forces that construct the socio-cultural landscape.
Can we create spaces where soft intelligences and deviant interspecies emotionalities teach us how to collaborate with technology and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) to build more just worlds? How can we recognize and challenge the stereotypical binary social norms we project onto our tools, codes, and bodies, allowing intimacy, vulnerability, and mutual care to guide us toward an inclusive future?
For this performance, I invited my friend and collaborator, Dr. Anna-Maria Velentza, who holds a Ph.D. in Human-Robot Interaction and was, at the time, a Fulbright Scholar at USC’s Interaction Lab. She contributed her research and expertise on Socially Assistive Robotics. Together, we performed a journey of lectures, demonstrations, power dynamics, dancing, and interactions with the audience, exploring cyborg companionships, gender roles in labor, the male gaze, political architectures of the body, and the embodiment of error and machine-failure as radical spaces for transformation.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of media arts, performance, and sculptural installations. My creations come to life in mixed-reality performances and immersive environments, forging connections between the tangible and intangible, where queer and affect theory meet affective computing, and where sculptural softness intersects with software. My world-building practice centers on themes of softness, deviance, kinship, affect, and community-building as resistance tools for queer transfeminist universes. I draw inspiration from queer performance studies, film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, sci-fi literature, speculative fiction, queer poetry, and feminist cinema, creating radically fluffy hubs for unruly presents and trans-punk futures.
I was born and raised in Athens, Greece, and my artistic journey began as a personal quest to navigate my own identity within the socio-political backdrop of my home country—amidst economic crisis, homophobia, transphobia, gentrification, and police brutality. This journey explored facets of my gender identity, sexuality, and my relationship with the world. While studying sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts, I became deeply immersed in feminist, queer, and decolonial art and theory, both as a creative outlet and a survival tactic. This new perspective led me to deconstruct and reconstruct the ways we perceive the world. I realized that the “truths” I had once accepted were constructed fictions, and that history is far from neutral. I understood that my goal as an artist was to craft my own narratives and embrace the stories of my community.
Eventually, the uncertainty in Greece became too overwhelming, prompting me to move to Los Angeles, where I pursued a Master’s in Media Arts at UCLA. During this time, I received numerous scholarships and awards, including from the Fulbright Foundation, the Onassis Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, as I sought a new path forward. I completed my master’s degree in Spring 2024 and immediately began my Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice at USC, where I am currently part of the School of Cinematic Arts, exploring the intersections of media arts and queer performance.
Currently, I am working on a collaborative project titled DENTAXUVIA with the artist Huntrezz Janos. The project began as a mixed-reality live performance, which premiered at the REDCAT Disney CalArts Theater during the NOW Festival 2023. We are now transforming the performance into a playable video game, exploring queer time and space, and translating the performativity and embodiment of our live bodies on stage into the potentialities of interactive computer simulations, pushing the boundaries of what we perceive as real. Our next show will be at TELEMATIC Gallery in San Francisco, co-presented by TRANSFER Gallery, with support from Onassis ONX.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I have been through many difficult journeys throughout my artistic career, and although it may sound a bit cliché, they have truly shaped who I am today. I have faced mistreatment from major art institutions in Greece because I was young and not yet established. I’ve had to fight with museums and museum directors to protect the rights to my artwork, and I’ve encountered situations where I had to pull my work from exhibitions due to censorship driven by transphobia and conservatism in Greece.
One of the most difficult moments was during one of the Fluffy Library workshops, when my artwork, my collaborators, and I were cyberbullied, and targeted by a far-right neo-Nazi criminal organization and former political party in Greece. It was one of the scariest moments of my life, but at the same time, I felt empowered by my community and the radical, subversive art we were creating—art that was disrupting the heteronormative status quo!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I am deeply inspired by queer, gender, and sexuality studies, queer performance studies, crip studies, film and media studies, New Queer Cinema, and cyberfeminism. Theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz, Amelia Jones, Sara Ahmed, Paul Preciado, and Karen Barad, have significantly shaped my artistic practice along with artists like Huntrezz Janos, Shu Lea Cheang, Lauren Lee McCarthy, micha cárdenas, Jota Mombaça, Ron Athey who have been a huge inspiration for my work.
I also wouldn’t be who I am today without the support and friendship of my friends and amazing artists in Greece. Some of them include my friend and force of nature, Margarita Athanasiou (media artist and director of the Athens Art Book Fair); my collaborator and incredible performer, Mochi Georgiou, who also runs Mpataria, a queer DIY publishing initiative focused on supporting and promoting queer underground art in Greece; and Lykourgos Porfyris, whose queer crip multidisciplinary art (and my favorite sound artist collaborations) has greatly influenced me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://antigonibunny.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antigonibunny/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antigonibunny/
• Other: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/antigonibunny