Non-human

The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in significant otherness. In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just cyborgs for earthly survival but also, in a more doggish idiom, shut up and train.

Donna Haraway is professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet. Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world,vand a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

"Scientists and artists know that the way to handle an immense topic is often through close attention to a small aspect of it, revealing the whole through the part. In the shape of a finch's beak we can see all of evolution. So through close, indeed loving, attention to a certain fascinating mushroom, the matsutake, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discusses how the whole immense crisis of ecology came about and why it continues. Critical of simplistic reductionism, she offers clear analysis, and in place of panicked reaction considers possibilities of rational, humane, resourceful behavior. In a situation where urgency and enormity can overwhelm the mind, she gives us a real way to think about it. I'm very grateful to have this book as a guide through the coming years." - Ursula K. Le Guin

ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM by Sina Seifee in collaboration with editor Renan Lauran and designer Foad Farahani, is immersion in the compiling and composing of Seifee’s notes on medieval bestiaries, and placing them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series that creates context and opens small descriptive steps towards (what Latour might call) “knowing interestingly” about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio-techno tales and old styles of knowing. As an “ecology of obligation” with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, is Seifee’s undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.

Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

Four young cats with wings leave the city slums in search of a safe place to live, finally meeting two children with kind hands.

Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term.