Praised for its honesty and intellectual rigor, Landscapes of Retreat has been recognized with the 2024 J.B. Jackson Book Award from the Landscape Studies Initiative at the University of Virginia. As the world grapples with the impact of both encroachment and abandonment—and their social and environmental consequences—this timely book invites readers to embrace retreat not as defeat but as a shared strategy for resilient futures.

“Landscapes of Retreat details what dealing with climate change actually looks like on the ground in five very different parts of the world. Elkin’s innovative research integrates the cultural, botanical, and geological aspects of the issue with a particular emphasis on 'how plants reflect and can modify these changes when people pay attention to what they are telling us about the environment.”

— Dr. Peter Del Tredici, Senior Research Scientist Emeritus, Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University

Expanding upon Zhao’s major exhibition project Seeing Forest, this book gathers newly commissioned essays and translations by leading writers and thinkers tracing alternate pathways through relational habitats, multispecies rhythms, and speculative futures. As pioneer trees stretch skyward and animals claim abandoned spaces, the forest becomes a repository of memory and transformation, a site where the wild and the urban converge in unexpected resonance.

With artwork by Robert Zhao Renhui and contributions by Michaela Büsse, Roland Ennos, Cal Flyn, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Mick Hennessy, Haeju Kim, Boaz Levin, Baptiste Morizot, Kang Min Ngo, Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin, Maya West, and Ying Zhou. Design by K. Verlag with Wolfgang Hückel and Katharina Tauer. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin.

We are a Berlin-based publishing atelier advancing new forms of the book-as-exhibition. We collaborate internationally with artists, authors, and institutions to develop publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design open radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.