Gabriel Alonso

A Book for Disappearance explores themes of extinction and ecology through the lens of contemporary technology and using AI and image-generation platforms as collective tools. It grapples with the contradictions of living in this world full of worlds and full of crises, while revindicating processes of nomadic becoming, transcending fixed identities, and collective emergence. While disappearance may seem abstract or esoteric, it has tangible implications for both individual and collective action. In this book, the concept of disappearance emerges as an alternative, including a variety of short poetic and experimental texts on the multiple possibilities that surface from our engagement with AI alter-egos and a collective artistic exercise with image generation technologies.

Texts by Laura Tripaldi, Institute of Queer Ecologies, and Stacy Alaimo provide further food for thought, and invite readers into recondite explorations—of parasitic spaces and ghost bodies through materialist feminisms; of oak archives and the previous lives that forests can narrate to us; of acid oceans and the psychedelic trips they might afford.

Plant Space: Territories, Architectures and Technologies of the Vegetal  brings together eighteen international contributors working across critical theory, philosophy, art, design, architecture, and critical ecology to radically reimagine the role of plants in shaping the built environment and its overlapping economies and ecologies. Framed by the entangled histories of extraction, enclosure, and domestication, this volume resituates plants not as passive scenery or symbolic decoration, but as formative presences: agents of spatial composition, political tension, and epistemic possibility. Developed in the context of the exhibition “Bordering Plants” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, essays and experimental formats examine the infrastructures, colonial residues, and aesthetic regimes that renderplant life visible, governable, or expendable. From houseplants, the imperial gardens of Vienna, and the global circuits of plant trade, to AI-rendered plants and satellite images in herbicidal warfare, the volume traverses the architectures, imaginaries, and techniques through which vegetal life is organized and resists.

Contributions by Elizabeth Bandason, Morgane Billuart, Carla Bobadilla, Laÿna Droz, Carmen Lael Hines, Michelle Howard, Adam Hudec, Roberto Majano, Hannah Meszaros Martin, Michelle Mlati & Pablo Barrios Martínez, Sandro Mezzadra, Serena Moscardelli, Ido Nahari, Akil Scafe-Smith, Caterina Selva & Lucia Stach, Lucia Gregorová Stach, Gabriel Alonso / Institute for Postnatural Studies.

The Compost Reader series sees the world as an interconnected being, where all its parts relate to one another. Composting as a way of cultivating consciousness through questions instead of answers, and from uncertainty and doubt. Hydro-memories, a talking lion, sounds that live in a snail shell, a dry swamp, a herbal medicine witch girl, ephemeral queer performances, chemical-sensing tentacles, stone eaters, scriptures-fossil, heavy cheese-like lids, dolphins in traffic, blue humanities, and digital forensic public spaces are some of the matters fermenting in this Compost Reader.

Authors:
Filipa Ramos
Panamby
María Morata and Lorenzo Galgó
Marie Skousen
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
Zachary Schoenhut
Pauline Ruffiot
alfonso borragán
Valeria Mata and Maxime Dossin
Esther Gatón
Cristóbal Olaya Meza
Paloma Contreras Lomas

Series Co-editors: Yuri Tuma, Gabriel Alonso

What is postnature? How to understand the socio-climatic crisis and where to look for new narratives for a desirable future? What is the relationship between contemporary ecology and artistic practices? The postnatural condition is a speculative glossary of terms and images, of stories and materials, an unfinished archive of intertwined thoughts. This book, which includes theoretical texts, situated examples, and artistic projects, presents a critical view of the modern Western conception of the "natural" and proposes new perspectives and resonances. Mixing affective philosophies, minor anthropologies, critical historical revisions, minimal histories, narratives, and stories on the margins, it seeks to proliferate a kaleidoscopic vision around ecology in an increasingly deteriorating world, inviting us to imagine and propose other worlds to come from respect, empathy, and coexistence.

Texts by Gabriel Alonso & Clara Benito with collaborators: Paloma Villalobo, Valentín Bansac, Nicolás Sánchez, Fionn Duffy, Aitor Frías, Andra Lena, Pop Juri, Geerts Dana, Lorenzo Galgó, Maria Morata, Valeria Mata, Maya Pita-Romero, Lily Chishan Wong, Sina Sohrab, Davide Marcianesi, Preethisakana Mathiseka, Alessandro Pasero, Anna Raffaghello, Ludmila Secchin, Federico Dopazo, Alba Noguera.