L. Mastromauro - Selected Publications

An Abecedary of Souths.

Theories, Practices, Ecologies of South America

(forthcoming, Routledge 2027)

This volume is grounded in a fundamental premise: the South does not name a geography, but a force operating within geographies and territories, deactivating hegemonic dispositifs of power and enabling us to conceive relations among forms of life differently. It brings together contributions from 40 researchers, artists and activists from South America, South Africa, Europe, the United States and Indigenous communities, invited to reflect on how this force might operate within South America and what perspectives it might open up. The aim is to build a network of concepts, practices and ecologies that rethinks South America as a web of multispecies and interdependent relations at a historical moment marked by layered socio-environmental crises. This is the first volume of a broader project that seeks to develop a new counter-narrative of territories by bringing together local and situated knowledges, political perspectives, multispecies ecologies, and community-based interspecies care practices. Among the contributors to the volume are Marisol de la Cadena, Ursula Biemann, Nicolás Cuvi, Camila do Valle (Nova Cartografia Social da Amazônia).

The Cosmic-City:

Art, Forest Citizenship, and Transpecific Alliances Beyond Western Citizenship

(GeoHumanities, 24 Jul 2026, pp. 1-15)

This article examines the role of community-based aesthetic and care practices in shaping new ways of understanding territories and citizen participation in political life. Through a genealogical reconstruction of the figure of the citizen within the Western political tradition, it highlights the limitations of this model and its deeply anthropocentric perspective. In contrast, the article explores the model of forest citizenship (florestania), which articulates relations of interdependence between humans and non-humans in the Brazilian Amazon. Following the suggestion of Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak, the article proposes this political model as a way of rethinking the city as multispecies and open to a form of hospitality that I call “cosmic hospitality.”

Che cos'è il Sud?

saggio sulla terra inappropriabile

(Meltemi 2024)

What is the South? What are we talking about when we speak of the South? Can we be sure that the theories, practices and geographies we commonly associate with this concept actually belong to it? In this book, which draws on research conducted between South America and Italy from 2016 to 2024, I propose a reconceptualisation of the South as a force that traverses territories and geographies and, by deactivating the operation of hegemonic dispositifs of power, enables us to conceive relations among forms of life differently. In particular, by combining biopolitics, relational ontologies and the Epistemologies of the South with an analysis of Indigenous knowledge and practices from South America, I argue that understanding the South as a force operating within geographies means transforming territories into networks of multispecies interdependencies.

The book was reviewed by Felice Cimatti, one of Italy’s most influential philosophers working on the relationships between humans and non-humans. It has generated several seminars, including one at the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History, as wll as a feature on one of Italy's historic and most influential radio stations. It has been cited in a PhD dissertation in Urban Planning and has become an important reference for the Master’s programme in Social Ecological Design at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Turin.