Marjolein van der Loo – författare

With a Bird, A Reader on Avian Kinship, edited by Marjolein van der Loo, invites readers into an expansive, cross-disciplinary conversation about how we live with and think alongside birds. In a time of climate breakdown and ecological grief, this book offers birds not as metaphors or curiosities, but as kin-creatures with their own histories, desires, and forms of knowing.Spanning speculative fiction, ancestral memory, critical ornithology, personal essay, and visual art, its contributions explore the fragile, often overlooked relationships between humans and birds across myth, science, migration, and dream. Through listening and attention, the book explores how birds shape landscapes, signal planetary change, and offer new ways of understanding time, voice, and relation.Contributors draw on decolonial, feminist, and ecological practices to unsettle dominant narratives and invite forms of care, reciprocity, and repair. From the mimicry of the lyrebird to the silence of vanished species, from winter dreaming to co-domestication and spectral presence, each chapter gestures toward multispecies futures grounded in presence and poetic attention. This reader, both a continuation of an exhibition and a gathering of distinct voices, becomes a spell — woven from memory, sound, and image — that reimagines kinship in flight.

The mandragora plant is one of the best recorded gynaecological herbal substances. It is also the only plant in the European context historically depicted as a half-human-half-plant-creature. The mandragora was, is and continues to be haunted by stories. Could its many stories hold a key for luring our minds off paths that have been sufficiently trodden down? What if the mandragora holds the potential for new orders and for world- making; for a cosmopoeisis of mandragoras.Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None explores the medicinal and magical mandragora plant, and the many stories that grew around it across history. Artist Leonie Brandner's writing moves from the beginning of recorded storytelling to ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology, tracing the lines the mandragora has left behind in medicinal books, folklore and eventually the impact the plant had in the hunt on so-called witches in the Middle Ages. Gently weaving her own perception and encounters with the plant through her rigorous historical research, Leonie Brandner creates a kaleidoscopical image of human-plant-imaginations across time.