Continuing K. Verlag’s longstanding engagement with decolonial ecologies and contested ideas of nature, We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors brings together artistic and theoretical practices from across Latin America.

Moving through extractive histories, environmental struggles, situated pedagogies, and more-than-human relations, the book asks how art might unsettle inherited separations between nature and culture, self and territory—and cultivate other ways of living with land and one another.

We live, like trees, inside
the footsteps of our ancestors.
We live, like spiders, in the net
of the maternal lair.

We always love on the edge of thirst.

We dream there, between kashii and ka’i
in the premises of the spirits.

We die as if we still were alive.

— Vito Apüshana

What would an ecology look like if it began not from managing catastrophe, but from the demand to live otherwise? In Pirate Ecology—So we can be free!, Fatima Ouassak begins from the racialized and ecological conditions of the French banlieue to connect land and animal liberation, freedom of movement, anti-racism, and internationalist struggle. Addressing children as much as adults, she sets sail in search of another world—one capacious enough for life to flourish differently.

“The tragedy,” James Baldwin once observed regarding the condition of the world, “is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits.”

In the decades since Baldwin’s words, artists, writers, and thinkers around the world have continued to call for more attentive, expansive, and radical practices of care—even as capitalist cultures have tightened their grip on life through security, accumulation, and disposability. In an era marked by disorientation and systemic crises, Pensées soignées proposes writing and translation not just as literary acts, but as modes of relation, resistance, and repair.

The national publishing award Deutscher Verlagspreis honors the excellence of small and independent publishers of all genres and colors—and it’s a true joy to be recognized, for the third time, in such an outstanding way.

A heartfelt thank you to the jury for this recognition of K. Verlag’s publishing practice—and to all the brilliant people who make our journey possible: the artists, authors, editors, and curators who shape each project with care and courage; the designers, text editors, and translators who bring thought into form; our printing partners, distributors, and the committed community of booksellers and librarians across the globe; and, above all, our readers. Your ongoing engagement and support mean the world to us.

We are a Berlin-based publishing atelier advancing new forms of the book-as-exhibition. We collaborate internationally with artists, authors, and institutions to develop publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design open radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.