Terraphilia. Beyond the Human in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections

Terraphilia explores how diverse cosmologies—mythical, spiritual, scientific, and ecological—shape our understanding of the Earth and our entanglement within it. The exhibition traces world-making practices across time, foregrounding relational ontologies, animist perspectives, dream knowledge, earthliness, and oceanic imaginaries, alongside decolonial strategies that challenge hierarchies between humans, nonhumans, and the more-than-human. Mobilizing art as a site of encounter and transformation, Terraphilia proposes love as both method and force—a planetary ethic rooted in affect, responsibility, and kinship—to reimagine how we live, think, and create together on a damaged Earth.

Extending this cosmopolitical inquiry, the accompanying publication functions not only as an exhibition catalogue but also as a reader, bringing together a constellation of voices from Amerindian perspectivism, trans*feminism, decolonial ecologies, the history of science, critical thinking, and political theory. It offers a layered framework for rethinking planetary life, proposing a generative ground for speculation, resistance, and re-worlding.

The volume features newly commissioned texts alongside seminal essays translated into Spanish for the first time. Contributors include Báyò Akómoláfé, Marisol de la Cadena, Lorraine Daston, Malcolm Ferdinand, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ayrson Heráclito, Eva Hayward with Ingo Niermann, Michael Marder, Álex Martín Rod, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, John Tresch, Sissel Tolaas, and Daniela Zyman. Their contributions move between philosophy and poetics, myth and method, affect and politics—charting speculative and grounded ways of living with and learning from the Earth.

Through its multidimensional lens, the publication invites readers to engage with the dynamic corpus of ideas and perspectives that both illuminate and complicate contemporary debates on ecology, extractivism, and planetary justice. Terraphilia encourages an open-ended and relational approach to knowledge—one that embraces complexity, uncertainty, and plurality. It explores how love for the Earth can take the form of intellectual inquiry, poetic speculation, and political responsibility, activating modes of care that are at once philosophical and embodied. As such, the book becomes a generative companion—an invitation to reimagine how to think, feel, and act in and with the world, and to take part in the ongoing labor of worldmaking.