A Tree,
A Reader on Arboreal Kinship

With contributions by Joss Allen, Céline Baumann, Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Jorge Menna Barreto, Renée Bus, Lucy Davis, Amirio Freeman, Manjot Kaur, Karen Lofgren, Anne Richter, Jerrold Saija, Oscar Salguero, Jonmar van Vlijmen, Müge Yilmaz, Gerbrand Burger, Chihiro Geuzenbroek, Femke Habets, Roderick Hietbrink, Ingela Ihrman, Mari Keski-Korsu, Alice Ladenburg, Hira Nabi, Frank Resseler, Sanne Vaassen.

Edited by Marjolein van der Loo

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.

Exhibition and Publication series
Folklore and Critical Research
2024 - 2028

A Tree, with a Bird, by a Woman, on Land, Under a Star

A Tree, with a Bird, by a Woman, on Land, Under a Star, is a recipe or a spell with exit points that become chapters and grow into their own ecology of stories and actors. Together they form a composition, a picture or a tarot card that tells about the future and the past or an insight, warning or recipe for now.

This research series with exhibitions, workshops and publications and program includes folklore and critical research as an apparent contradiction here as a rich encounter. Science and intuition come together, enter into conversation and question each other, from hard figures to spirituality. Ecofeminism is an angle with which the themes are approached, a critical philosophy that sees connections between the oppression of ecology and women and strives for their joint emancipation.

2024 - A TREE,

Plants make the world; they create soil, shape landscapes, and regulate the climate to some extent. They produce oxygen. They provide fuel, food, building materials, and shelter, and form ecologies where all kinds of species come together to enter into a myriad of symbiotic partnerships. 

The exhibition A Tree, draws on vegetal agency, plant knowledge, and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Forester Peter Wohlleben says people often misunderstand trees, mainly because they are so slow. We can apply the concept of tree time here; rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time. Showcasing research and works in which artists explore the relationship between people and trees, this exhibition tries to set its own watch to tree time, uncovering ways in which we can relate more closely to their time span. 

  • Onomatopee

  • Gerbrand Burger, Models for Deep Storage

  • Roderick Hietbrink, The Living Room

  • Further Reading

  • Bookshop

  • Manjot Kaur, Tree in a Jharokha

  • Sanne Vaassen, Fractals

  • Ingela Ihrman, The Wandering Spruce

  • Alice Ladenburg & Ollie Palmer, Trees of Rotterdam

  • Goldin + Senneby, Spruce Time

  • Hira Nabi, How to Love a Tree

Stories of the Boneless One - Tuomas A. Laitinen

Co-editor

How do decentralized brains work in morphing ecosystems? How can an octopus act as a conductor for discussions about ecology, mythology, and symbiotic worldmaking? How would it be possible to stretch the imagination to think about interspecies communication and the possible perspectives this premise might open concerning biodiversity and ocean ecosystems?

Ctongue is a book that attempts to answer these questions. It combines old and new technologies, new research in the intersection of neurosciences and biology, experimental poetry, and meditations on various ecosystems through these aquatic lifeforms.

Tuomas A. Laitinen has been working with octopuses since 2016, and this research has manifested in various modalities: glass sculptures made for octopuses, multiple audiovisual works, and a glyph typeface drawn from the research on octopus arm movements.

This cluster of works forms a base for the book in a proposal to reveal the experimental and tentacular research process. Being true to its central conductor, it brings many minds together in a single body.

THREE BECOMES
TWO BECOMES
ONE BECOMES
NONE

This is the story of one plant growing on the soil of the human mind. It is a story that started with a physical plant, yet transformed and warped over the course of 5000 years of human history into something utterly otherworldly. It is a story of life and death, lust and jealousy, greediness and anxiety; it is the story of the Mandragora.

The Mediterranean-growing Mandragora is a medicinal plant and one of the best-recorded gynecological herbal substances across history. In Ancient Greece, it was used as an aphrodisiac, a sleeping aid, and as a narcotic in surgeries to induce labor and expel stillbirths. But the Mandragora is more than simply medicinal – the herb is mysteriously depicted as half-human-half-plant. The stories that emerged around the enigmatic human plant grew into a potent fairy tale and even a belief system known as the ‘Alraunglaube’. The belief stimulated a flourishing counterfeit trade, became the grounds for numerous witch trials, and was most potent where the plant itself never even grew: in Northern Europe. But by the start of the 19th century, the plant's knowledge and story suddenly vanished into obscurity.

Editor for an eco-feminist gathering of stories on the Mandrake and European witch-hunts by artist Leonie Brandner. 
Published by Onomatopee, October 2024. 

The Far Side of Paper, Recomposed

Solo exhibition by An Onghena
at KIKA Gallyer, Kyoto (JP)

The Far Side of Paper, Recomposed, is part of the project Book&Space, a collaboration between Limestone Books Maastricht (NL) and KIKA Gallery Kyoto (JP) initiated by Marjolein van der Loo.
Book&Space offers an exhibition opportunity in Kyoto for artists/bookmakers in the Maastricht border region, including Aachen, Liege, and Hasselt (NL, DE, BE).
Book & Space takes the artist’s book as a starting point and wants to investigate how a book can relate to space by activating the KIKA Gallery with an exhibition. 

An Onghena was selected by a professional jury in the Netherlands and Japan through an Open Call in the Autumn of 2023.

The book Katsura Hito orbits around the Katsura tree. This tree is an elemental spirit of the Japanese landscape in the fall season. As the transformation of the Katsura’s colored leaves and their enchanting sweet scent changes the sensorial experience of their environment, they remind us of our connection to the seasons. The tree’s embeddedness in Japanese folklore and traditional storytelling leads us to a yokai supernatural spirit, legend, and gardener: Katsura-Otoko, or, in Chinese; Wu Gang. His efforts in pruning the Katsura tree on the moon to cause lunar cycles connects cosmology to ecology as a natural part of our earthly existence. The story’s premise serves as an inspiration and starting point for this project.

This publication introduces the Katsura tree as a point of departure from which to map a rich ecology of relations and experiences with materials (recipes, exercises, and images) that accompany stories—fictional and “factual”—of a multi-sensorial experience of the fall season. 

The writing questions modern/colonial binaries like east and west, nature and culture, fact and fiction, higher and lower senses, and the human and non-human. It calls readers to not only exercise awareness of their environments but to imagine along with them. 

During two residency periods in the winter of 2021 and 2022 at ARCUS Project in Ibaraki, Japan, one online and one on location, I worked on the project and produced the book designed by Yannick Nuss.

KATSURA HITO

KATSURA HITO is sold out and will soon go to re-print

Chairwoman

Thinking Forest Foundation

Thinking Forest is an initiative of artist Gerbrand Burger and is realized by the Thinking Forest Foundation. Thinking Forest is a radically sustainable exhibition space where ecology, contemporary art, and science meet in a production forest. The double meaning of ‘Thinking Forest’ points to both the natural wisdom of the forest as an ecosystem and a place to think, reflect, and learn, an organic model for developing and spreading seedling ideas. Art and wood production, decay, biodiversity, science, and a public program come together within the forest. Thus the notion of ‘production forest’ can be reimagined as beneficial to all nature, humans included, instead of nature’s submission. Thinking Forest aims to combine the production of wood and other forest products with the presentation of contemporary art and cultural events, regenerative forestry with a long-term perspective, and small-scale development and construction of bio-based housing on a new forest estate. 

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