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Throughout her prolific career, Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves has focused precisely on this question. Perhaps her most iconic, generative, and expansive work is Seeds of Change, a twenty-year investigation into the hidden history of ballast flora—displaced plant seeds found in the soil used to balance shipping vessels during the colonial period. The project examines the influx and significance of imported plants, materializing at port cities across several continents: Marseille, Reposaari, Liverpool, Exeter and Topsham, Dunkerque, Bristol, Antwerp, and most recently New York, where it was awarded the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. In each city, Seeds of Change has revealed the entangled relationship between “alien” plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples, contrasting their seemingly innocuous beauty with the violent history associated with their arrival. By focusing on ballast flora, Alves invites us to de-border postcolonial historical narratives and consider a “borderless history.” The first monograph of Alves’s historic project, Seeds of Change is edited by Carin Kuoni and Wilma Lukatsch and features essays by the artist as well as Katayoun Chamany, Seth Denizen, Jean Fisher, Yrjö Haila, Richard William Hill, Heli M. Jutila, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Lara Khaldi, Tomaž Mastnak, Marisa Prefer, and Radhika Subramaniam.Egor Petrovich Kovalevsky embarked on a journey through what is today Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, recording his impressions of a region in flux. Invited by Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali to look for gold and construct mines in the area between the Blue and White Nile, Kovalevsky captured the social milieu of both elites and ordinary people as well as compiled a rich record of the Upper Nile’s climate and natural resources. A Journey Into Inner Africa, masterfully translated into English for the first time by Anna Aslanyan, is both a tale of encounter between Russia and northern Africa and an important document in the history and development of the Russian imperial project.

"The first extensive monograph for Brazilian artist and activist Maria Thereza Alves, and the subject of her solo show at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporneo in Seville (2015), The Long Road to Xico gathers more than 20 projects made between 1991 and 2015. The publication includes several rare works in the United States and Brazil and an early participant in discourses around post-colonialism and ecology. Includes essays by the editor, Pedro de Llano, and TJ Demos, internationally recognized professor of art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016)."--Amazon.

'Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road' is the outcome of a collective undertaking that came about from Jimmie Durham who gathered together a group of artists in 2021 to form "a community on the road" and contribute in collaboration with him to documenta fifteen in Kassel in 2022.Durham did not expect the members of the collective --Bev Koski, Elisa Strinna, Hamza Badran, Iain Chambers, Joen Vedel, Jone Kvie, Maria Thereza Alves, and Wilma Lukatsch -- to elaborate a single work or theme.Instead, they would share knowledge, empathy, and humour and leave open the possibility that their different contributions could entwine.The writing, images and perspectives found in this volume, including essays by authors also invited by the collective to contribute, reflect their heterogenous genesis in artistic processes, critical pedagogy and multiple cultural practices.Brought together under a common commitment to the rejuvenation of inherited languages in the arts and contemporary culture, the authors have sought in their different ways to sustain proposals whose poetics suggest, stimulate and sustain the politics of inhabiting the planet in a radically diverse fashion.This booklet is published on the occasion of 'Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road', 18 Jun - 25 Sep, documenta fifteen (Kassel).

"The first extensive monograph for Brazilian artist and activist Maria Thereza Alves, and the subject of her solo show at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporneo in Seville (2015), The Long Road to Xico gathers more than 20 projects made between 1991 and 2015. The publication includes several rare works in the United States and Brazil and an early participant in discourses around post-colonialism and ecology. Includes essays by the editor, Pedro de Llano, and TJ Demos, internationally recognized professor of art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016)."--Amazon.

Realização: Grupo de Pesquisa, Cidadania e Arte (UFRGS) e Laboratório de Arte e Subjetividades (UFSM) Coordenação Geral: Cláudia Zanatta (UFRGS) e Rosa Blanca (UFSM) Na primavera austral de 2018 e no verão de 2019 realizamos o I e o II Simpósio de Investigação em Arte: Intervindo, Migrando e (Se) Deslocalizando, com a participação de artistas e pesquisadoras(es) do Brasil, Colômbia, Cuba, Equador, México e Espanha. Os simpósios foram organizados conjuntamente pela Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (México) y Universidad Autónoma de Hidalgo (México). É a partir destes dois encontros que surge a presente publicação, reunindo um conjunto muito diverso de ensaios, entrevista e artigos que se tangenciam e cruzam diferentes perspectivas, pontos de vista, inventando formas de dizer, olhar, escutar vozes, territórios, localizações e (des) localizações. No presente volume, linguagens e diferentes idiomas tecem vizinhanças muitas vezes improváveis, afetos invisíveis, permitindo e perguntando sobre outras rotas de escrita e de leitura. Realizamos o esforço para que essa publicação ocorresse em 2020, em meio a tudo o que não tem favorecido a vida, a arte e a educação em nosso país e respondemos com coragem ao momento em que os encontramos ao nos reunirmos neste volume pensando, escrevendo, lendo, imaginando, criando modos de florescer. Dizemos: aqui estamos, fazendo com que nossas práticas e reflexões se toquem, se alterem e se potencializem ao estarem juntas. São poéticas que não se dão por eventos, mas também em eventos e que tecem rotas, tentativas, intencionalidades, tentações, fugas, estrangeiridades, (des)localizações ou como cada leitor as desejar chamar. Boa leitura! As organizadoras.