Among Animals. Six publications on interspecies relationships

Equally inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet, ‘A Bestiary of the Anthropocene’ is a compilation of hybrid creatures of our time. Designed as a field handbook, it aims at helping us observe, navigate, and orientate in the increasingly artificial fabric of the world. Plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, fordite, artificial grass, antenna trees, Sars-Covid-2, decapitated mountains, drone-fighting eagles, standardised bananas… each of these specimens are symptomatic of the rapidly transforming “post-natural” era we live in. Often without us even noticing them, these creatures exponentially spread and co-exist with us.

‘Animal Touch’ explores some of the most important critiques of human-animal relations – centring questions of labour – with an emphasis on an equitable distribution of resources, symbiotic relations and the sentience of the more-than-human world. With thirteen newly commissioned contributions, this interdisciplinary publication shows the ways that activist, literary, scientific, feminist, sociological and artistic strands of work meet, sharing common concerns and challenges. New possibilities of relating to the more-than-human world are explored through environmental issues and animal rights – but also through consumption, the body, language and desire. Through these encounters, this book aims to advance our thinking and imagination about the ways we can establish more ecological and equitable relations with nature in its broadest sense. Animal Touch is dedicated to all animals, those close to us and those not so close, to the privileged, the abused and the overlooked, real and imaginary.

‘Enfleshed: Ecologies of Entities and Beings’ is evolving from the multifaceted, poly-vocal long-term research and a series of exhibitions Enfleshed–Elaborated (2020-) by artist Kristiina Koskentola. The publication is co-edited by curator and educator Marjolein van der Loo and published by Onomatopee.

Enfleshed: Ecologies of Entities and Beings brings together practitioners, thinkers, and artists from across Eurasia to collectively explore multispecies ecologies. The volume reflects anthrodecentric and embodied approaches to collaboration and knowledge production––processes that are always interwoven with a multitude of entities and actors. 

In this book, the contributions flow like a river across the Eurasian continent, branching out into all directions. The contributors engage in an exploration of experimental epistemic alliances, which operate as a way to learn and make new dialogic relations. The conflicts generated by ecological disaster, war, the global economy, identity politics, and the power structures of knowledge production and science here intertwine with shamanisms, rituals, magic, speculation, politics, and poetics. How do we imagine an active and implicated role of the human as one being among other beings? What might this entail, and what might this generate?

‘with a Bird, A Reader on Avian Kinship’, edited by Marjolein van der Loo, invites readers into an expansive, cross-disciplinary conversation about how we live with and think alongside birds. In a time of climate breakdown and ecological grief, this book offers birds not as metaphors or curiosities, but as kin-creatures with their own histories, desires, and forms of knowing.

Spanning speculative fiction, ancestral memory, critical ornithology, personal essay, and visual art, its contributions explore the fragile, often overlooked relationships between humans and birds across myth, science, migration, and dream. Through listening and attention, the book explores how birds shape landscapes, signal planetary change, and offer new ways of understanding time, voice, and relation.

Contributors draw on decolonial, feminist, and ecological practices to unsettle dominant narratives and invite forms of care, reciprocity, and repair. From the mimicry of the lyrebird to the silence of vanished species, from winter dreaming to co-domestication and spectral presence, each chapter gestures toward multispecies futures grounded in presence and poetic attention. This reader, both a continuation of an exhibition and a gathering of distinct voices, becomes a spell — woven from memory, sound, and image — that reimagines kinship in flight.

With contributions by John Berger, Ignace Cami, Monika Czyzyk, Bryony Dunne, Daniel Godínez Nivón, Daisy Hildyard, Manjot Kaur, Natalie Lawrence, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, Michelle J. Moyer, Evangeline M. Rose, Bernard Lohr, Karan J. Odom, Kevin E. Omland, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ai Ozaki, Maria Popova, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Yuri Tuma, and Suzanne Walsh.

‘Entanglements’ is a groundbreaking anthology that plunges subjectivity beyond the human realm. Roses, fungi, shit, algorithms, jays and other weird beings people this experimental biopoetic, where a polyphony of new voices (human and more-than) explore our oldest ethical inquiry—the question on how to live—in an estranged present.

A pornodelirium where an urban multiplicity, a deceased eros, materialises into a suffocating, technological macro-organism; a golden creature cracks the self parallel to the mass production of animals; a multispecied nurse narrates her relationship with ravens, jays and an orphaned kestrel in a Wild Animal Rescue Station; a drain technician is contaminated by fatbergs; extinction is conceived as a kinky burial party in an erotic elegy; while a love algorithm’s technical malfunctions represents an existential threat to users. From erotic prose to programming, the multimodal tales and illustrations in this volume invite the reader to dive into posthuman co-existence.

“We must get to know plants intimately and on their own terms. We must learn to ‘vegetative’ our all too human sensorium. We are not alone.”- Natasha Myers.

This book provides information and tools for curating that takes more than human ethics into account.

“By offering information, we hope to make a small contribution to a more equal attitude toward more than human animals and plants. The word guidelines may seem limiting but restrictions can, we speak from experience, even stimulate your imagination. (…) The publication is very pragmatic and not only informs, but offers the reader a new working method to really make an impact, every being counts.”