Abstract: This text is based on conversations with Milan Stanisavljević, a Serbian sculptor, who carves black oak; an ancient wood, which is thousands of years old and can be found on the bottom of river Kolubara. Milan’s descriptions of his intimate relationship with the antique, carbonised wood intrigued us. Our curiosity led us away from Milan’s art and urged us to follow the wood. Following the path of the ancient oaks, we constructed a speculative fabulation, from the time when these photosynthesising ancestors formed a liveable world. Along the way we admired the affordances of mentioned ancestors, their intra-actions with microorganisms, and chemical and biological processes within them. We felt the force of the river water re-crafting itself, its surroundings and the oaks, we considered a long, natural and nutrient cycle of wood fossilisation, we dwelt on the moment when that cycle is interrupted and redirected by human activity, coal mining and Milan’s crafting. Dealing with products of human crafting, valued and accepted in the institutional art system, and regarding them from a specific post-human and more-than-human perspective, made us aware that our expectations and our theoretical and discursive interests were inevitably reshaping the existing artwork, just as it has already been reshaped by a certain dominant art world discourse. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-4855-8_13 https://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:27933 doi:10.1007/978-981-19-4855-8_13 info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart Сарвановић, Ана eng Keywords: Speculative fabulation, Environment crafting, Wood crafting, Black oak, Art discourses 2022 Expanding Environmental Awareness in Education Through the Arts 33 application/pdf 1218874 bytes Springer link The many lives of a tree: speculative fabulation on environmental reshaping processes and their discursive symptoms http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode