The Cosmic-City: Art, Forest Citizenship, and Transpecific Alliances Beyond Western Citizenship

We are so accustomed to taking the concept of citizenship for granted that we treat it as an unquestionable premise of political discourse. Yet the global ecological crisis and ongoing acts of ecocide call for a radical rethinking of political participation and relations between forms of life. This research, combining political, anthropological, ecopolitical, and art-historical approaches, compares the Western notion of citizenship with that of forest citizenship (florestanía), which expresses the relational mode of life of Amazonian populations. Through a genealogical analysis of Western citizenship and its biopolitical functions, the study highlights its structural limitations. The analysis of Indigenous cosmologies and networks of interdependence between humans, animals and plants reveals the forest as a living fabric of alliances. By comparing these two models, the research proposes rethinking Western cities according to the logic of the forest, imagining cities open to a shared ecopolitics grounded in a form of cosmic hospitality.