Socio-environmental crises have challenged the anthropocentric approach through which the West has historically conceived and organised territory, demonstrating that plants, animals, rivers, rocks and forests are not merely nature, but political subjects with which new strategies for territorial governance can be developed. If taken seriously, the presence of non-human actors as political agents in public disputes can enable the development of new political forms that are more inclusive and ecologically just. My work seeks to understand how relationships between humans and non-humans, grounded in local knowledges, can shape and organise multispecies territories.

About ten years ago, I began investigating how aesthetic and care practices grounded in local forms of knowledge can counter extractivist policies in South America, opening new possibilities for rethinking territories. This led me to explore apparently simple questions: What is a territory? What is the South? What are the pitfalls embedded in the ways in which we have historically interpreted these concepts? In research conducted in parallel with my doctoral research and developed between South America and Italy from 2016 to 2024, I investigated the political genealogy of the concept of territory within the Western political tradition, demonstrating its relationship to the concepts of terror and the exercise of violence. Through the analysis of several case studies of South American Indigenous thought and practices, I explored forms of interdependence between humans and non-humans that open up the possibility of a multispecies understanding of territory, challenging the Western anthropocentric model. Finally, I sought to develop a definition of the concept of the South, rethinking it not as a geographical category but as a force acting within territories that can deactivate the operation of power dispositifs and enable us to conceive relations among forms of life differently.

These three perspectives have converged into an independent research programme that seeks to analyse, through an interdisciplinary approach, the practices and theories through which territories are rethought as multispecies. The first volume of this programme focuses on South America and will be published by Routledge in 2027. It brings together contributions from 40 scholars, artists and activists from South America, South Africa, the United States, Europe and South American Indigenous communities.

I am currently expanding and complementing this research through the development of more-than-human cartographies based on interdependent relations between humans and non-humans, informed by situated and local forms of knowledge.