“Composting” instead of Concluding

Taking stock of what our editorial learnings are, the reflection that concludes our volume notices the circular returning to and revising of earlier ideas at later stages throughout a process that has, by now, roughly spanned five years. It began around 2020 with some seeding individual thoughts on problems of cohabitation and ecological degradation as reflected in artistic practices in Chinese contexts. They became a fast growing, sapling-like shared thematic concern by 2021, prompting us to formulate a call for papers for the international symposium on “Cohabitation—Worlding the Sinophonecene and Planetary Aesthetics in Contemporary Art” that took place by 2023 and turned into the selected and revised case studies of several participating scholars and later attained conversations with a few curators gathered in the book at hand. Looking back, situating ourselves, and taking stock of our shared concerns, engaged expertises and resultend academic achievements, we feel that rather than concluding, we are consciously “composting,” in the sense of drawing energy from our learnings to continue (re-)searching for ways into cohabitational, transcultural, and planetary futures.