Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics
Sternberg Press, 2024

Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics, edited by Sofia Lemos, unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways, reflecting the vitality of water, from source to sea. A diverse group of artists and writers set out to trace river systems from the sierras and forests of southern Spain, to the heartlands of the Americas and the undersurface of the Mediterranean, proposing new routes for collaborative research and knowledge-production.

In newly commissioned texts and a selection of influential essays—including a transhistorical dialogue between the twelfth-century mystic, Ibn ‘Arabī  and the renowned essayist, Sylvia Wynter—as well as lyrics, scent, recipes, critical-contemplative writing, and guided meditations, Meandering combines rich visual documentation with insights from the fields of art, visual culture, environmental humanities, ecotheosophy, mysticism, critical theory, and decolonial studies. This volume offers a practical and poetic toolset for a dynamic reconciliation between action and imagination to address the pressing social and environmental challenges of our time. 

This publication is part of an art and ecology research program of the same name curated by Sofia Lemos at TBA21–Academy. By exploring social and environmental justice through the lens of community-oriented practice, it presents a case for the role of artistic research and public programs in revealing our interbeing, and shapes new convergences between interdisciplinary and interfaith studies.

There is a special relationship between rivers and imagination. Both bring life to the Earth, mix climates and territories, disrupt hierarchies, and produce the unity of all places. This book is an ode to the power of rivers (and their earthly imagination), which never stop creating.—EMANUELE COCCIA, Philosopher and author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture

Meandering is an engaged and meaningful collaborative project that swerves away from colonial history to bravely seek that elsewhere. A beautiful way to pursue living and embodied research practice that meanders with care into the past-present-future, in order to find the gentle and illuminated space of the decolonized beyond.—MACARENA GÓMEZ-BARRIS, Endowed Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, and author of The Extractive Zone