We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors

Somewhere between canopy and root, memory and resistance, we live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors. This evocative phrase—originally coined by Vito Apüshana, a poet from the Wayuu people in the Guayira peninsula, northern Colombia—gives shape to a publication that gathers artistic and theoretical practices from across Latin America. It focuses practices that refuse colonial and Western-centered notions of nature, and instead grow through ecological sensibilities, situated pedagogies, and more-than-human knowledge systems.

Bringing together decolonial, ecocritical, and multispecies perspectives, the anthology traces how historical conditions, environmental struggles, and extractive economies shape the terrain of contemporary Latin American art. In the face of neoliberal dispossession and ecological collapse, it surfaces alternative ways of understanding land, life, and kinship—ways that challenge the entrenched separations between nature and culture, self and territory.

Featuring a range of contributions from artists, curators, and scholars—including reflective essays, critical writings, and conversations—We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors offers radical visions of the environment. Each piece reimagines the relationship between humans and the more-than-human, unearthing epistemologies rooted in place, relation, and resistance. Together, they invite us to think with the Global South—not only about crisis, but about how to live otherwise.

Mariana Cunha is a researcher and educator, currently developing theoretical and practice-led research at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, where she lectures in screen studies. Holding a PhD and MA in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck, University of London, she previously held two postdoctoral fellowships in Brazil. Her research explores ecology, spatial practices, affect, and moving images, with a focus on ecological aesthetics in contemporary global cinema and Latin American moving image-based art. Mariana has contributed as a film programmer in Brazil and the UK and co-curated the exhibition We live like trees inside the footsteps of our ancestors (Blenheim Walk Gallery, 2023). She has published widely, co-editing Human Rights, Social Movements and Activism in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2018) and Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (2017).

Marianna Tsionki is an art theorist, curator, and Associate Professor & University Curator at Leeds Arts University, overseeing curatorial programs, collections, and archives. She holds a PhD in Curatorial Studies (Manchester School of Art) and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory (Goldsmiths, University of London). Her research examines the role of curatorial and institutional practice in ecological crisis, focusing on decolonial eco-visualities, eco-feminist practices, and Indigenous Naturecultures. She has contributed essays to edited volumes, exhibition catalogs, and peer-reviewed journals and received numerous grants, including the AAMC Research Programme with Art Fund (2019). She has participated in the School of Common Knowledge by L’Internationale (2024) and the Anthropocene Campus Venice by the Max Planck Institute and HKW (2021).

This book is forthcoming in Summer 2025