A Tree: A Reader on Arboreal Kinship brings together artists, writers, and thinkers to renegotiate the relationship between humans and trees — not as resource or metaphor, but as co-inhabitants moving through radically different registers of time.
About This Book
Trees make the world in ways that exceed human accounting: they build soil, shape climate, and anchor ecologies where countless species enter into symbiotic exchange. This reader, edited by Marjolein van der Loo and published by Onomatopee, takes vegetal agency seriously — inviting readers to sit with plant knowledge and arboreal kinship through imagination, poetry, art, music, and storytelling. The contributions resist anthropocentrism directly, using tree time as a lens through which to examine capitalism, coloniality, and individualism. For practitioners and researchers working at the intersection of ecology, design, and critical theory, it is a compact but genuinely generative provocation.
Key Features
- 128 pages of written and visual contributions spanning poetry, critical essays, and artistic responses to vegetal life
- Written contributions by Joss Allen, Céline Baumann, Bárbara Sánchez Barosso, Jorge Menna Barreto, Renée Bus, Lucy Davis, Amirio Freeman, Manjot Kaur, Marjolein van der Loo, Karen Lofgren, Anne Richter, Jerrold Saija, Oscar Salguero, Jonmar van Vlijmen, and Müge Yilmaz
- Visual contributions by Gerbrand Burger, Chihiro Geuzenbroek, Femke Habets, Roderick Hietbrink, Ingela Ihrman, Mari Keski-Korsu, Alice Ladenburg, Hira Nabi, Frank Resseler, and Sanne Vaassen
- Published by Onomatopee, ISBN 9789493382077
What You'll Discover
- How tree time — a temporality defined by ecological experience rather than industrial or clock-based rhythms — can reframe human assumptions about agency and progress
- The ways trees function as thinking partners: through meditation, storytelling, and problem-solving, across cultures and probably across the entirety of human history
- A sustained critique of anthropocentrism, capitalism, and coloniality developed not through polemic but through art, music, poetry, and cross-disciplinary practice
- The mechanics of arboreal ecology — how trees literally produce soil, generate oxygen, and create conditions for myriad species to enter into symbiosis — as a model for thinking beyond individualism
About the Author
Marjolein van der Loo is the editor of this reader and also contributes a written piece to it. Further biographical details are not provided in the source material. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 128
- Dimensions: 110 × 170 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789493382077
- Publisher: Onomatopee
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, landscape designers, and researchers engaging with ecology, critical theory, and more-than-human design thinking — as well as artists and educators working at the boundary of environmental practice and social critique.