An Orobic Journey. On Migratory Restlessness, Community, and Multispecies Geographies was conceived as an editorial extension of Thinking Like a Mountain – The Orobie Biennial (2024–25), independently developing a constellation of reflections moving through the ecological, social, and cultural themes that emerged over the course of the project.
Published by Lenz and edited by Valentina Gervasoni and Lorenzo Giusti, the volume goes beyond merely documenting the artistic experiences that arose over the biennium, and through essays, conversations, and visual narratives, it proposes an expanded field of inquiry. The collected contributions highlight the established paradigms of Western ecological imagination, critiquing given concepts such as nature, wilderness, and landscape, along with all the colonial, political, and symbolic implications they imply. By exploring the mountain as an epistemological lens through which to understand and rethink contemporaneity, An Orobic Journey opens up a series of reflections on the future of the mountainside and the ways it may be inhabited.
Drawing on perspectives from ecocriticism, anthropology, geography, ornithology, and artistic practices, the book embraces a multiplicity of viewpoints—from multispecies migrations to the redefinition of communities, from the mountain as a cultural construct to ongoing socio-environmental transformation. The insights brought together in the volume engage both scientific knowledge and ancestral wisdom, marginal experience and collective practice, questioning the relationship between bodies, territories, and systems of coexistence.
Rather than offering a singular interpretation, the volume serves as a device to explore notions such as care, community, belonging, rituality, and political imagination, opening up plural cosmologies and alternative ways of thinking about human–nonhuman relationships.
Contributors:
Annamaria Ajmone, Atelier dell’Errore, Elena Bassi, Enrico Bassi, Yesmine Ben Khelil, Cecilia Bengolea, Julius von Bismarck, Bianca Bondi, Emanuela Borgnino, Sonia Boyce, Roberto Casti, Maurizio Cattelan, Gabriel Chaile, Mosè Cometta, Giulia Costanzo Talarico, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Giammarco Cugusi, Marta Cuscunà, Michela de Mattei, Adele Dipasquale, EX., Adriano Favole, Simone Ferracina, Francesco Ferrero, Frantoio Sociale, Gaia Fugazza, Ilaria Gadenz, Agnese Galiotto, Chiara Gambirasio, Valentina Gervasoni, Lorenzo Giusti, Michael Jakob, Zeyn Joukhadar, Alice Kentridge, Amal Khalaf, Agostino Iacurci, Invernomuto, Brandon LaBelle, Alice Labor, Greta Martina, Alessandra Mignatti, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Mozzarella Light, Bertram Niessen, Serpil Oppermann, Veronica Pecile, Francesco Pedrini, Marie Petersmann, Roberto Picchi, Giulia Rispoli, Francesca Rossi, Angela Rui, Lin May Saeed, Ana Silva, Giulio Squillacciotti, Studio Ossidiana, Federica Timeto, Miriam Tola, Mauro Varotto, Pedro Vaz.