Fluffy Library

About

A mysterious creature - Fluffy, known to scientists as flufiella chimaerica – that lives in libraries, eats books, and digests them into knowledge through its many fuzzy cavities is taking over our Front Room. Fluffy is the creation of visiting Greek artist Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou – marking her UK premiere in Arnolfini after a year’s residency in Athens, curated by Vassilis Zidianakis, the Artistic Director of ATOPOS Contemporary Visual Culture (ATOPOS cvc). 

The cuddly beast has just left ATOPOS cvc’s library, bound for Arnolfini and hoping to make new friends, find new food, and seek love, hugs, and radical tenderness along the way. With islands of pillowy fur, slick vinyl, and a cast of monstrous beings – the Dragon Princess, the Hairy Fairy, the Bearded Horse, and more – Fluffy Library is a soft-sculptural installation for those of us who wish their fairytales had been a little more adventurous with identity, gender, and human relations. Besides Fluffy, there is a monstrous alphabet of hybrid identities, making new languages and new narratives through storytelling.

Fluffy Library aims to blur the boundaries between different ages and open up spaces for different identities. How good a grasp can we get of the uncanny and how much tenderness can we give to or gather from it?

Fluffy brings with them a collection of gender-neutral, positive and playful literature. So cuddle up, roll around, and grab a book.

Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou (b. 1994, Athens) is an artist whose work combines large-scale participatory installations with interactive performances and is deeply influenced by queer feminist dialogues. She explores the notion of playfulness as a political act and also as a tool to create alternative senses of desire, self-expression and co-existence. Her fluffy, intimate installations are safe spaces that embrace uncommon narratives and blur the boundaries between different ages and genders. Through collaborations, workshops for kids and fluffiness she is trying to connect art together with alternative pedagogy and activism.

Her work has been showcased at the 6th Biennale of Thessaloniki, the 10th Berlin Biennale “We don’t need another hero” in collaboration with Fabiana Faleiros at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the National Opera of Greece. Her latest project “Fluffy Library”, commissioned by ATOPOS cvc, lasted for one year as part of ‘’UNESCO’s Athens 2018, World Book Capital".

ATOPOS Contemporary Visual Culture (ATOPOS  cvc) is a non-profit Cultural Organization, founded in 2003 in Athens by Stamos Fafalios and Vassilis Zidianakis who is also the Artistic Director of the organization. Its aim is to implement innovative projects of contemporary visual culture, with particular emphasis on the human figure and costume.

The word ‘atopos’, from the ancient Greek “άτοπος”, refers to that which is the strange, the unwonted, the eccentric and the unclassifiable.