The article offers an analysis and interpretation of Sámi creative works presented within the national Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Arte 2022: The Milk of Dreams. Four works are examined in detail: the transmedia book Čatnosat, Máret Ánne Sara’s olfactory-sculptural installations Du-ššan-ahttanu-ššan and Ale suova sielu sáiget, and Pauliina Feodoroff’s performance Matriarchy. These projects both document Sápmi/Sámi everyday life and prefigure its possible, desirable transformations. They resist simplified interpretive frames of loss and ruin, and thus each of the works is interpreted as an affective refuge of radical hope in Jonathan Lear’s sense: a hope that sustains the possibility of life after the collapse of familiar worlds, reaching toward futures that cannot yet be fully articulated, seen nor understood.

The analysis situates the Pavilion in dialogue with more-than-human studies and studies on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), while also drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars such as Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate). Their insights underscore the importance of shifting from research “on” Indigenous peoples to research “with” them, acknowledging Indigenous ontoepistemologies as generative rather than supplementary. The analysis is thus conceived as an exercise in co-thinking rather than comparative critique. The Sámi Pavilion and the chosen Sámi works are read as sites where art, life, and environment are inseparable, and where radical hope plays a crucial affective role in believing in a potentially sovereign and livable Sámi future.

The article investigates the notion of refugium as both shelter and enclave, situating it in relation to wetlands (swamps, marshes, and peat bogs) and their significance in the literature and cultural imagination of Central and Eastern Europe. The author’s point of departure is however the idea of silence, music, and listening, understood as intimately entangled with the cultural practices of refuge making. The analysis foregrounds the auditory conditions of this process, drawing attention to the complexities of the human relation to the environmental soundscape in the Anthropocene, as well as to the challenges of cultivating arts of attentiveness within environments saturated by technology and digital simulacra.

The second part of the article focuses on the cultural perception of wetlands in the European thinking, tracing their ambivalent position: on the one hand, as sanctuaries of unspoiled nature, spaces of intimate encounter with elemental forces and sites of retreat; on the other hand, as zones of exile – dangerous, impure, and accursed – which are resistant to modernization. Within this discussion, a new narrative is introduced, emerging in connection with the so-called wetland turn in the environmental humanities. The narrative exposes the Enlightenment drive toward drainage and reclamation as an attempt to conquer wetland environments and to colonize their inhabitants. The final section returns to the nexus of refugium, silence, and music, approached through an analysis of the sonic representation of wetlands in contemporary Polish nature writing. Here, the notion of a sonic refuge of the Anthropocene is explored in relation to ideas of multispecies assemblages, heterogeneous temporalities, and polyphonic modes of listening, as articulated in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s conceptual framework.

The article problematizes the figure of Noah’s Ark, which has dominated thinking about refuge-making at the time of the ongoing ecological crisis. The author argues that the refuge-maker does not always have to be human. Refuges can also emerge from the co-operation between humans and more-than-humans. Drawing on the findings of environmental humanities, the article closely examines three examples of “speculative gestures” (Stengers, Debaise) of recent transdisciplinary projects at the intersection of architecture, design, performance art, and eco-activism. In these projects, refuge-making becomes a strategy of “collaborative survival” (Tsing). First, the analysis of the installation Refuge for Resurgence (2021) by the Superflux collective shows how a refuge may become a site for a multispecies pluriverse. Next, the multimedia project Pending Xenophora (2020–2022) by Mari Bastashevski reveals the tensions and frictions that arise from collaboration with a specific species. Finally, the project The Anthropocene Museum (2020–ongoing) by the Kenyan collective Cave_bureau serves to demonstrate that refuge-making can involve a decolonial gesture of breaking away from the harmful ecological practices of Western modernity.

This article offers a reading of Andrey Platonov’s short story The Cow (1938) through the lens of social reproduction theory and practical manuals on livestock care, situating the analysis within the context of Soviet animal husbandry from the 1920s to the 1940s. Platonov, a Soviet writer who deeply reflected on collectivization and the building of communism in relation to nature, as well as a practitioner – land-reclamation specialist, and engineer – is today being widely reconsidered from an ecological perspective. In this work, I aim to complicate the discussion of Platonov’s ecological poetics by turning to agricultural practices of care toward different beings. Accordingly, I refer to practices that took shape in the first half of the twentieth century, before the emergence of the concept of “animal welfare,” and went hand in hand with the communist ideal of liberating all exploited workers, regardless of their gender, race, or species.

By considering The Cow as a vivid bifurcation point between socialist animal-care practices and communist ideology, and reading the text through the agrobiological discourse of brochures advocating care for all beings, both classed and classless, I develop a critical analysis of the relationships among the story’s characters. My approach extends the material-discursive and biopolitical dimensions of Platonov’s work, especially in relation to care, caregiving, and the construction of a new communist society envisioned to include both human and nonhuman proletarians. To trace the cow’s ambiguous position as a being that is neither fully human nor fully animal but inhabits a liminal space between nature and culture, I engage with the intersections between Platonov’s texts and the concepts of the animal (Jacques Derrida), the Other (Emmanuel Levinas), and communitas (Roberto Esposito), exploring more broadly the possibilities of care for the nonhuman.

In his writing on solastalgia, Glenn A. Albrecht, the creator of the term, only stops for a brief moment to ponder on the possibility of an animal solastalgia. While he does not elaborate on the topic, he admits that in his view, it is, in fact, possible for nonhumans to experience similar distress as humans do when feeling homesick for the home they have never left, but which has been transformed beyond recognition. This article explores the depiction of animal solastalgia in a digital game Endling – Extinction is Forever (Herobeat Studios, 2022), which features a nonhuman protagonist: a mother fox, the titular endling – the last of her kind – in search of her lost kit. The reading of the game as a depiction of animal solastalgia comes with several consequences relating to the representation of a nonhuman species in an immersive medium such as a digital game, where the player takes control of an animal body. Another problem lies in depicting nonhuman experiences in paralel with the human experience of solastalgia and struggle for survival in a terraformed world, as if those where one and the same. The analysis of Endling draws from the works of Marie-Laure Ryan on emotional and strategic space and place in digital games, as well as the game studies scholarship on video game aesthetics and nonhuman or animal avatars.