Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou | At Present I Exist Otherwise

At Present I Exist Otherwise is a multimedia installation that continues Antigoni's ongoing Fluffy Library project, bringing its soft sculptures and queer archive of books into intimate relation with moving image, digital performance, and augmented reality, so that physical and virtual forms bleed into and transform one another to explore how queer past and present collide and how queer history can become embodied. Fragmented moving images are embedded within the sculptural space, while augmented reality opens passages between the physical and the virtual world. Softness becomes both material and method: a way of holding bodies, images, and histories without fixing them. Visitors are invited into bodily proximity with the soft sculptural forms, making the encounter tactile, intimate, and participatory.

Engaging with a queer archive of books, the project develops a series of digital performance re-enactments. Its first iteration turns to the photographs and writings of Claude Cahun, the genderqueer surrealist artist and writer of the early twentieth century. Their self-fashioning, fragmented identities, and refusal of fixed gender are approached through motion capture and avatar performance. Using their own body, Antigoni activates these traces not as a history to be reconstructed, but as gestures and unfinished transformations that can shift across bodies, media, and time.

The project will expand through collaborations with other performers, activating further queer and trans archives, books, and histories through bodies, voices, and gestures that are recorded, 3D-scanned, and reassembled across physical and digital forms. The installation becomes a porous embrace for these encounters, asking how fragments of queer pasts can remain active in the present, mutate toward speculative futures, and be held by worlds that are themselves soft, technological, and unfinished.