Open access monographs

[Sigi Jottkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>]

Dear friends of OHP,

This month, we are delighted to announce the latest release in Tom Cohen's and Claire Colebrook's Critical Climate Change series:

The Chernobyl Herbarium, a collaboration between the artist Anaïs Tondeur and the philosopher Michael Marder on the 30th anniversary of Chernobyl.

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-chernobyl-herbarium/

We entrust readers with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images — one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable as it is, we insist on the need to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize it, taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.

“Welcome these blossoming photograms exposed to the flashbulb of intertwingled planetary mutation. Tune in and turn on with these crackling plant transductions of Chernobyl’s ongoing signal, verbed and reverbed with Marder’s exhalations of word. Behold Tondeur’s exalted haptic photosynthesis! Adore the nimbus of radioactive bioluminescence that avoids your avoidance! Let there be plant light.”

Rich Doyle, Penn State University – author of Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere.

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