A Tree – A Reader on Arboreal Kinship

A Tree, is about vegetal agency, plant knowledge, and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Like all plants, trees make the world; they literally create soil, shape landscapes, and affect the climate. They produce oxygen. They provide fuel, food, building materials, and shelter, and form ecologies where a myriad of species come together to enter into various symbiotic partnerships. Trees are wonderful to think with, and humans have been doing so—through meditation, in all kinds of storytelling, and as partners in problem-solving—probably for as long as they have walked the earth. Trees are also time tellers, rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time. Through this reader, the aim is to nurture and encourage dialogues and to share inspiration on exercising arboreal kinship by taking the time to think about trees differently through imagination, art, music, storytelling, poetry, and images. Moreover, the contributions in A Tree, inspire us to move beyond large systems of oppression and towards exorcizing anthropocentrism, capitalism, individualism, heteronormativity, and coloniality, by learning from and with tree time. With written contributions by Joss Allen, Céline Baumann, Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, 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.