curated by Nadja Argyropoulou
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Landscape and Planting Design by Despoina Sarakinioti
Aquatic Plant Consultant by Giannis Gryllis
On-Site Planting by Despoina Sarakinioti and Giannis Gryllis
Plants Sponsored by Gryllis Water Lilies
The installation In The Wild is a living, visual poem composed of a film and an aquatic garden, borrowing its title from HRI (Human-Robot Interaction), where the term refers to what happens beyond the controlled conditions of the lab. Here, “in the wild” is about softer and queer ways of sensing and understanding ourselves and the world around us, beyond the demands of optimization, legibility, and extraction.The work explores relationality, embodiment, and lived experience across human, robotic, and more-than-human bodies through wetland time and space; a temporal and spatial condition that is slow, ever-changing, material, and collaboratively worlded.
It also attends to the feminized and often invisible labor that sustains technological systems, asking what forms of care, maintenance, and exhaustion remain hidden beneath fantasies of automation. Moving between the digital and the analogue, between clarity, resolution and grainy, glitchy opacity, the work blurs the boundaries between old and new technological imaginaries. Drawing on archival and contemporary robot advertisements, it explores how the language of automation continues to echo histories of eugenics, control, and legibility.
Wetlands emerge here as liminal zones at the edge of biodiversity, vulnerability, and endurance, persisting under the threats of technological progress, urban expansion, and industrial growth. What can wetlands teach us about intelligence, about holding without resolving? Here, bodies of water and bodies without organs choreograph a refusal to be operated on, opening a living surface of affection, fragilization, and potential becoming between natural and artificial worlds.
Filmed through digital video, 16mm, archival material, and a robot-dog camera, the work moves between Kalochori in Thessaloniki, the Ballona Wetlands in Los Angeles, and the LIRES Robotic Lab at the University of Macedonia, where Dr. Anna-Maria Velentza appears beside the social robots that accompanied her doctoral research in Human-Robot Interaction.