K. Verlag

Front cover of Rosetta S. Elkin, Landscapes of Retreat – We are delighted to celebrate the release of the second edition of Landscapes of Retreat by Rosetta S. Elkin. This unique book redefines “retreat” as an essential cultural response to the escalating challenges of climate change—not as an act of surrender, but as an intentional, collaborative practice of adapting and learning to coexist with a transforming planet.

Through immersive fieldwork in five distinct geographies, Elkin examines the forces shaping our landscapes—wildfires, landslides, deforestation, and sea-level rise—and offers a thought-provoking perspective on adaptation. Praised for its honesty and intellectual rigor, Landscapes of Retreat has been recognized with the 2024 J.B. Jackson Book Award from the Landscape Studies Initiative at the University of Virginia. As the world grapples with the impact of both encroachment and abandonment—and their social and environmental consequences—this timely book invites readers to embrace retreat not as defeat but as a shared strategy for resilient futures.

We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors (front cover image) explores artistic practices from Latin America that challenge Western and colonial notions of nature. Adopting decolonial, ecocritical, and more-than-human approaches, the book examines environmental struggles, extractive economies, and the failures of colonial modernity, resurfacing alternative epistemologies and interspecies kinships. Bringing together scholars, artists, and curators, the publication presents radical perspectives on nature-human relations, resisting conventional ideologies of progress, landscape, and territorial ownership. Through reflective essays, dialogues, and critical texts, it underscores the deep entanglement of ecological crisis and colonial histories in the Global South.

Elastic Continuum (Processing Process) explores the shifting connections between people, plants, politics, and power through the transformations of Taraxacum koksaghyz, the Kazakh or Russian dandelion. Unfolding in two intertwined trajectories, the book traces the plant’s historical role in Soviet, Nazi, American, and European economic imperialisms, while following artist Bethan Hughes’s encounters with its story across breeding labs, archives, and landscapes. Interweaving text, images, and documentation from Hughes’s audio-visual installation, the book reveals the entangled biographies of a flower and a woman. In doing so, it challenges extractive narratives, offering alternative ways of seeing and relating to the natural world.