b. Athens, Greece, 1993 - based in Los Angeles, California.
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou is a multidisciplinary artist working across moving image, installation, performance, and sculpture. Their practice constructs speculative worlds and stories that blur the lines between reality and fiction, the physical and the digital, centering queer, femme, and non-human voices that exist at the edges of dominant social, technological, and economic systems. Their projects usually take the form of multi-channel video installations, experimental films, performative environments, and participatory sculptural installations that invite viewers to inhabit shared spaces over time. In these spaces meaning emerges through affect, sensing, materiality, non-linear time, embodiment, and shared presence. Their practice explores how bodies relate, rehearse roles, and form temporary alliances to resist techno-capitalist regimes, keeping vulnerability, desire, play, and metamorphosis to the forefront. The use of technology in their work functions as a vehicle for reimagining worlds of affective and planetary regeneration. The cinematic is approached as something spatial and collective, expanding beyond the screen into environments where stories are felt rather than explained. Material choices, from soft textiles and 16mm film to archival footage and elemental matter like plants or water, carry political meaning; it is about softness and fragilization. Collaboration—with artists, performers, friends, and sometimes machines—is central to their practice, grounding the work in relational and situated processes. Across different projects, Tsagkaropoulou returns to speculative worldbuilding, visionary fiction, or remixing of the archive as a way to revisit neglected histories and imagine other modes of living together through a shared past, present and future.
CV
Their research builds a lineage from feminist experimental film and queer performance to XR (Mixed Realities) and expanded moving image, approaching XR as a contemporary site where those earlier formal and political strategies reappear, shift, and mutate.
Another part of their research is exploring the affordances of softness as an agential and queer quality with the ability to disrupt techno-capitalist systems of surveillance and heteronormative domination. They think about softness as something deviant, dirty, glitchy, ecological and agential, rather than clean, sterile, and predictable. Softnes intervene into technology by shifting theories of intelligence from disembodied computation toward material, relational, and more-than-human ways of knowing (“soft intelligences”). In their work, softness also becomes a tool for experimental cinema making, shaping the materiality of the moving image, non-linear perceptions of time, and sensory embodiment. Their background in sculpture and performance has deeply informed their filmmaking and media arts practice. They approach both the cinematic and the technological through an affective experience that disrupts rigid narratives and notions of efficiency, control, and optimization. Their moving-image practice always comes back to their installation roots, creating spaces where softness becomes a material strategy and a political one, shaping how images are encountered, how time is felt, and how bodies can (trans)form.
They hold a BFA in Visual Arts and Sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece and an MFA in Media Arts from DMA-UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture, supported by numerous scholarships, including those from the Fulbright Foundation, the Onassis Foundation, and the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Their work has been supported and exhibited by institutions internationally such as Bristol’s Center for Contemporary Arts (Arnolfini), Honor Fraser Gallery, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) x UCR as part of PST Art, Gray Area, Hebbel Am Ufer (HAU), Wrightwood 659, NRW-Forum Dusselforf, Onassis ONX, TRANSFER Gallery, and Thessaloniki Biennale, among others.