The publication gathers and presents a series of performance scores, documentary poems, developed during mirko nikolić's artistic research project "water is (non)life: de-extractivist poetics in the semi-periphery." The poetic-critical texts and visuals document a recent history of extractivism in the European resource peripheries, with specific focus on a series of contentious extractive projects impacting rivers and communities in Balkan. Research methodology centres the backgrounded and marginalised visions and voices contesting extractive developments, instead striving for environmentally and socially just alternatives. The narratives also highlights how social movements for environmental and climate justice connect and dialogue trans-locally and trans-nationally. 

The scores featured in the book took place at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers, close to a limestone mine in south Norway, at the old iron mine in the island of Utö in Stockholm archipelago, and were presented at exhibitions in Belgrade, Stockholm, Skellefteå, and other places. Correspondingly, the poems move and travel between languages, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, English and Swedish. Part I features 5 versions of "water is (non)life" performance across three languages, moving and transforming through time, place, and across the languages. Part II explores and highlights international dimension of extractivism by focusing on threads tying stories in the Balkans with the public pension savings in Sweden. The book includes a bibliographic apparatus, and closes with "By the River," a critical reflection by Jesper Olsson. The publication was developed in collaboration with Johnny Chang / Living With Images. The photographs featured in the book were authored by mirko nikolić and Duško Jelen.

The project was funded by a Swedish Research Council artistic research grant (2019-02301_VR), and was hosted at the Division of Language, Culture and Interaction, Linköping University.

This essay reads work by Samuel Beckett, especially his prose, with a focus on vegetal ontology and plant life, soil, mud, and dirt. By juxtaposing Beckett with recent fiction, e.g., the Netflix series Stranger Things, contemporary plant theory, and the general ecology of Erich Hörl, posthuman entanglements and relations are discussed as part of an ontological infrastructure in the texts, which can also be linked to Beckett’s interest in prosthetics and technical media. It is suggested that an approach of this kind might offer new perspectives on the dispersed subjectivity in Beckett’s texts.

This chapter investigates how media historical transformations in the decades after the Second World War affected radio art and sound poetry and, especially, their (re)presentations of humans and animals. Apart from new sound technologies (e.g. the tape recorder), information technology and cybernetics are crucial here, not least in promoting an ‘ecologisation’ (Erich Hörl) of thinking and being, which problematises anthropocentrism and subject-object configurations. Instead, there is a transition to relationality and immersion. In this chapter, the potential of sound for staging and exploring such a transition is investigated and underlined through analyses of radio art and poetry by Swedish artists and poets Åke Hodell and Öyvind Fahlström, partly framed by a discussion of Samuel Beckett’s early radio play, All That Fall (1956). In the Swedish works, attention is paid to birds and their calls primarily, but also to other sounds, which displace the human voice and gaze as organising agencies and establish a more diffuse and open acoustic space and time. The latter is designated as a ‘posthuman sound ecology’, which stresses not only the sonic presence of other beings, but also a poetically shaped and playful transmutation of the established, almost naturalised, hierarchies and relations between humans and non-humans.