An Orobic Journey. On Migratory Restlessness, Community, and Multispecies Geographies was conceived as an editorial extension of Thinking Like a Mountain – The Orobic Biennial (2024–25), independently developing a constellation of reflections that traverse the ecological, social, and cultural themes emerged throughout the project.
Published by Lenz and edited by Valentina Gervasoni and Lorenzo Giusti, the volume goes beyond merely documenting the artistic experiences born during the two-year period; instead, it entrusts essays, conversations, and visual narratives with the task of proposing an expanded field of research. The collected contributions challenge the consolidated paradigms of the Western ecological imagination, critically interrogating the categories of nature, wilderness, and landscape, as well as the colonial, political, and symbolic implications that accompany them.
By exploring the mountain as an epistemological lens to understand and rethink the contemporary era, An Orobic Journey opens up a series of reflections on the future of the mountain and the ways in which it is inhabited.
Through perspectives drawn from ecocriticism, anthropology, geography, ornithology, and artistic practice, the book opens up a plurality of viewpoints—ranging from multispecies migrations to the redefinition of communities, from the mountain as a cultural construction to ongoing environmental and social transformations. The insights gathered bring scientific and ancient knowledge, marginal experiences, and collective practices into dialogue, questioning the relationship between bodies, territories, and systems of coexistence.
Rather than offering a single interpretation, the volume acts as a device for exploring notions such as care, commonality, belonging, rituality, and political imagination, opening the way to plural cosmologies and alternative modes of thinking about the relationship between the human and the non-human.
Contributors:
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Elena Bassi, Michela de Mattei, Invernomuto
Enrico Bassi
Yesmine Ben Khelil
Elena Biserna and Ilaria Gadenz
Bianca Bondi and Annamaria Ajmone
Emanuela Borgnino and Ilaria Gadenz
Gabriel Chaile
Mosè Cometta
Adele Dipasquale, Alessandra Mignatti, Roberto Casti
Adriano Favole and Greta Martina
Simone Ferracina
Francesco Ferrero, Giammarco Cugusi, Roberto Picchi
Valentina Gervasoni
Lorenzo Giusti
Zeyn Joukhadar
Alice Kentridge and Gaia Fugazza
Amal Khalaf
Brandon LaBelle
Alice Labor
Asunción Molinos Gordo and Giulia Costanzo Talarico
Bertram Niessen
Serpil Oppermann
Veronica Pecile
Marie Petersmann
Giulia Rispoli
Francesca Rossi and Agnese Galiotto
Angela Rui and Giulio Squillacciotti
Studio Ossidiana
Federica Timeto
Miriam Tola
Mauro Varotto and Ilaria Gadenz
Julius von Bismarck and Michael Jakob
