And the Earth along… Tales about the making, unmaking and remaking the world
The book introduces the framework for the ambitious eponymous publishing project that aims to explore how humans and non-human “relate to their worlds” through trans-disciplinary research and diverse forms.
The book “And the earth along… Tales about the making, remaking and unmaking of the world” was initiated by essay of researcher Martin Pogačar (ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana).
The book introduces the framework for the ambitious eponymous publishing project within the context of Museum of the Commons. The project aims to explore how humans and non-human “relate to their worlds” through trans-disciplinary research and diverse forms. The project follows and traverses histories and conceptualisations of natural phenomena, technology, industry and extraction, knowledge and the imagination, as well as the politics underpinning “cosmotechnics”, philosopher Yuk Hui’s term to describe the coming together of the cosmos and the moral.
The Lack of Forest: Eco Monuments in the ruined world
My essay reflects on an artistic and research practice developed within The Lack of Forest, a long-term, land-based project situated in the post-hurricane landscape of the Tuchola Forest in Poland. Emerging from the aftermath of a catastrophic storm, the project engages with landscapes of loss as sites where destruction and regeneration unfold simultaneously.
The hurricane is approached not only as a force of devastation but also as a moment of revolutionary power that radically reconfigures ecological relations, social imaginaries, and modes of inhabiting damaged land. By setting the forest in motion, it activates complex processes in which crisis, shock, ecotrauma, revival, order, bonds, and biodiverse justice become entangled. Through attentive engagement with decay, overgrowth, and the biological feast unfolding on the ruins, the project foregrounds the agency of more-than-human processes in reshaping the forest as a living assemblage.
Together with local inhabitants, project participants, and collaborating researchers, The Lack of Forest examines how ruined forest terrains—shaped by fallen trunks, surviving trees, and dispersed particles of organic matter—become sites of dwelling rather than absence.
Central to the practice is the development of a place known as The Mound, located in the heart of the post-hurricane region. The Mound functions as a site of gathering and commemoration—an autonomous zone excluded from industrial extraction and dedicated to natural processes of dispersal and transformation. It operates as a model of an eco-monument: a non-heroic, processual form of commemoration embedded in local materiality and collective action. Constructed from approximately 120 uprooted trees and forest remains, The Mound embodies both affirmation and surrender. Its ongoing life constitutes an intervention that resists narratives of restoration and control, instead proposing practices of care, memory, and coexistence within a ruined world.
By situating artistic practice within post-catastrophic forest ecologies, the essay argues for eco-monuments as tools of ontological reworlding—forms that acknowledge loss while opening space for new relations between humans, forests, and the more-than-human life that persists after the wind.
