Fluffy Library is a participatory installation and subversive library by Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, a non-binary multidisciplinary artist from Greece, based in Los Angeles. The installation is part of the artist’s decade-long research on softness as a queer quality, serving as a catalyst for radical intimacy, collectivity, and storytelling in resistance to the rigidity and control of our productivity-driven society.
Legend has it that a gigantic, ageless, gender-fluid, chimeric creature—Fluffy—occupies spaces, devours books, and digests them into knowledge through its many fuzzy burrows. With islands of pillow-like fur, slick vinyl, and a cast of whimsical, monstrous beings—the Dragon Princess, the Hairy Fairy, the Bearded Beauty, and others—this cuddly beast seeks new friends, food for thought, and moments of love, hugs, and tenderness.
Fluffy Library is a space for collective experiences, where multiple subjectivities vibrate together immersed in the fluidity and coziness of soft fluff. It is for those of us who wish their fairy tales had been a little more adventurous and are ready to explore alternative narratives of gender, sexuality, and interspecies co-existence. How good of a grasp can we get of the uncanny and how much tenderness can we give or gather from it? The installation brings a collection of transfeminist fiction and graphic novels, inviting the audience to cuddle up, roll around and dive into the fluffy universe.
Through workshops, events, and collaborations with other artists, educators, and collectives the project aims to build bridges between art, radical pedagogy and social activism, and become a gathering place for diverse audiences including children, all types of families, schools and people from the queer and LGBTQI+ 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, 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 an effort to make art inclusive and accessible to a wider audience, Fluffy Library has hosted several workshops for children and their accompanied caregivers. The workshops were conducted in collaboration with educators, drag queens and activists.
Part of the project also included a special curation of several events in collaboration with other artists, performers, musicians, collectives and publishers such as Queer Ink, The Political Fatties and Burning Eye Books. Cosy evenings of absurd storytelling, poetry slams, queer film projections, girls power music nights, performances about disability, installations and residencies.