National Year of Reading – Interview with Filipa Ramos
Our next interview for the National Year of Reading is with curator and writer, Filipa Ramos...
What was the first non-fiction/arts book you remember reading, and what was its impact on you?
I was a real bookworm as a child and as a teenager. I am so lucky not to have had any computers or cell phones while growing up! This reading practice still goes on, and reading remains one of the big pleasures of my life. When I was a teenager, my father lent me his copy of Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society, which made me fall in love with medieval history, a passion I pursued with great fervour while studying art history at university. I was ready to embrace a career as a medievalist when I had a conversation with my professor of early medieval history, who told me that she sometimes felt lonely working with people from the past, unable to speak with them or ask them questions. That conversation stayed with me and eventually shaped my decision to move towards contemporary art. In a curious way, the passion Bloch’s book awakened led me towards living artists. It also taught me that a book can change your life in ways that only become clear much later.
What’s the latest art/design/other book you’ve read?
I recently finished Simonetta Greggio’s Le Souffle de la forêt, which, as far as I know, has yet to be translated into English. It tells the story of Simona Kossak, a Polish biologist and ecologist who lived for more than thirty years in the Białowieża Forest, the last remaining primeval forest in Europe, and now threatened both by climate change and by the political situation in the region. She combined scientific research with an intimate knowledge of the creatures and environments around her, while defending the forest from exploitation.
I had been fascinated by Olga Tokarczuk’s monumental Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (which remains one of my most beloved books ever) and discovering Simona felt like encountering, within an actual life, some of the questions that animate Tokarczuk’s writing: what happens when someone takes animals seriously as subjects of their own lives, what forms of knowledge become possible through sustained attention, and why a woman who defends animals is so readily described as eccentric, excessive or mad.
Images of Simona sharing her house, her bed, her table and her living room with a huge boar, a lynx and numerous birds show how rich and surprising a life can be when we open ourselves to other creatures with more curiosity than fear. Her life offers an incredible example of how it is possible to combine scientific precision, political commitment and intimate coexistence. She understood that protecting a forest also requires learning how to perceive and love the lives unfolding within it.
What is your favourite Lund Humphries book, and why?
One of my favourites is Nina Möntmann’s Decentring the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies, from the New Directions in Contemporary Art series edited by Marcus Verhagen, which Lucy Myers gave me when we had our first meeting about The Artist as Ecologist. Möntmann examines how the colonial and Eurocentric histories of museums remain embedded in their collections, exhibition policies, architectures and institutional structures, and considers how museums might be transformed through practices of repair, situated knowledge, cooperation and decentralisation.
This is particularly important to me because ecology as a practice is constantly inviting us to question where centres have been placed, whose knowledge has been legitimised, which lives and histories have been made visible and which have been treated as background or resource. Möntmann understands institutional change as something that reaches beyond programming, beyond making shows “about” this or that, and enters the infrastructures through which decisions, relationships and forms of value are produced. As someone who also works through exhibitions, I find this insistence very necessary.
What is currently on your to-read list, and why does it appeal to you?
My to-read list is way too long. Too many books, too little time! At present, I am reading Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind in connection with LIAF, the Lofoten International Art Festival that I am curating next year. Carson writes from the perspective of a black skimmer, a mackerel and an eel, making tides, migrations, hunger, predation, weather and seasonal change perceptible from an embodied perspective that is quite different from ours. She combines scientific exactitude with imagination, portraying the coast as a dense field of interdependent lives rather than as a landscape.
I am also reading Pierre-Olivier Dittmar’s L’Invention de l’animal: Essai d’anthropologie médiévale, which is fascinating. Dittmar examines how the Middle Ages gradually produced “the animal” as a general category to radically (and, alas, almost irreversibly) reshape the idea of the human. He looks at how Christianity shaped the classifications and hierarchies that separated humans from other creatures, while animality was also projected onto particular human bodies, especially those of women and other people placed at the edges of the social and moral order. The book reconnects my passion for medieval times with my research into animals and it reveals that many divisions we now experience as natural were historically constructed and hopefully remain open to being questioned and transformed.
If you were starting a star-studded art or architecture book club, who, from any era, would you like to invite?
I would invite Hildegard of Bingen, for her understanding of bodies, plants, music, cosmic vitality but also migraines as a creative force, and Michael Marder to join her, as he has written so much about her musical and vegetal thinking. I would love to be joined by Ursula K. Le Guin, whose imagination and writing across genres expands the forms through which other lives and worlds can become perceptible. Also, and always, by Joan Jonas, who is an avid reader and whose work has taught me so much about animals, images, performance and storytelling. My furry reading partners, Meo, Misha and Tao, would be there to keep us company. While I was teaching at the Arts Academy of Malmö last year, I passed by a public library, where a group of children were reading for dogs, and it was such a delightful sight! It made me realise that the pleasure of reading can also be an interspecies affair, and for this reason I would also invite Donna Haraway, who has been pushing us to join animals in asking questions and seeking different answers.
Filipa Ramos is a curator and writer whose work intersects art, moving images and ecology. She is a Lecturer at the Arts Institute of the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Basel, where she also leads the Art and Nature Master seminars, and Curator of the 2027 edition of LIAF, the Lofoten International Arts Festival. Her publications include The Artist as Ecologist (Lund Humphries, 2025), The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (as co-editor) and Animals (as editor). By merging curatorial practice, writing and transdisciplinary research, Ramos has expanded the discourse of Art History towards an ecological sensibility, encouraging museums, curators and artists to envisage art as a catalyst for social and environmental change.
Pictured above: Filipa Ramos reading Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind during her stay at the Artists’ House in Svolvær, Lofoten, Summer 2026.
