This book results from the “Biodiversity of a livable city. Species extinction and survival as cultural heritage” grant, which was part of the international project "Extinction as cultural heritage? Exhibiting human-nature entanglements with extinct and threatened species,” carried out in cooperation with Norwegian and British institutions.
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Refugia: The Survival of Urban Transspecies Communities is not only meant to inspire the study of unexpected transspecies relationships and discussions about their survival and future development but also to show that we must cherish and support multi-species urban communities. The book is a product of transdisciplinary research, including knowledge-producing artistic projects, whose research and communication methodology overcome academic jargon. The essays and artistic forms of expression collected in this book demonstrate, as Donna Haraway points out, that we must “join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and re-composition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.” The book consists of two parts. Part one is a collection of academic essays which analyze various cases of interspecies relationships created in cities by human and non-human animals, plants, fungi, soil, and architecture. Part two is a collection of artistic statements – a visual documentation of projects created for the exhibition Refugia: Keep (Out of) of These Places. The perspectives offered by art differ from those generated by the humanities or sciences, but they have been formulated in cooperation with these fields.