A co-creative experiment in feral ways of knowing, sensing, and making sense with more-than-human worlds.


Loops Archive

Loop 1 - Becoming Eco-social Change

The first Feral Gift Loop brought together artists, designers, researchers, and social change-makers of various backgrounds to reflect on and performatively enact their diverse experiences of eco-social change. See the full Loop. 


Loop 2 - Multispecies Sensemaking: When are we together? (Coming Soon)

Capturing moments of multispecies co-existence, where human and other-than-human lives come together in an intentional attempt to understand and make sense with each other. Moving together, following each other's time, to the point when we meet.  
Loop 3 - Finding Everyday Spectacles (Coming Soon)

Foraging for spectacular moments of everydaylife co-existence in Finnish forests, gardens, and street corners.   


How to Loop

A Step-By-Step Guide to Create Your Feral Gift Loop
  • 1] Gather a group of (other-than) humans willing to participate.

  • 2] Set a theme or a focus for your collective feral gifting → (or maybe you want to start with a theme and gather a group of contributors around that? Then swap steps 1 and 2).

  • 3] Organise a get-together with your group to agree on the structure of your loop exchange: How long will your loop take (days, weeks, months, aeons)? When will each contributor share their prompt? How much time can others in the group take to respond?

  • 4] Decide on a communication channel that you will use for your loop and the exchange of prompts and documented enactments. We’ve used Telegram so far, but you can do whatever you want. You might also set up a shared cloud storage to upload larger files.

  • 5] The Feral Gift exchange can happen privately, with gifts being shared only among a closed group of contributors. But if you all agree, you can also share your process more widely - for instance by using this online Feral Gift archive (under a CC BY-NC-SA license) or at any other place you prefer. You can also organise the whole loop publicly and facilitate the exchange via a public channel - it depends on you; what you wish to explore, with whom, and how. In Loop #1, we shared our process at the Uroboros 2022 festival in Prague and later at a symposium in the .zip spaceRotterdam.

  • * If this sounds too prescriptive, you can always come up with a different way of facilitating the gifting exchange.


Get In Touch

The Feral Gift project was initiated in 2022 by Markéta Dolejšová and Danielle Wilde, as an ongoing experiment open to further contributions. 

The project is supported by Uroboros Festival and Aalto ARTSand the website was generously funded by the Kone Foundation

If you want to organise your own Feral Gift Loop, feel free to use this site as an inspiration and let us know how it went. We are happy to include your Loop in the online Feral Gift archive under a CC BY-NC-SA license, but you can share it wherever else you like. 

Do you have any questions or ideas related to the project? Send us a message . 

Disclaimer

The content of this site, including materials shared in all Loops, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).  Click hereif you would like to view a copy of this license. 
Feral Gift is a co-creative experiment in feral ways of knowing, sensing, and making sense with more-than-human worlds. 

A co-creative experiment in feral ways of knowing, sensing, and making sense with more-than-human worlds.

Feral ways, like the creatures who roam them, thrive beyond boundaries, in the liminal places between the wild and the domesticated, the familiar and unknown, the serendipitous and intentional. They are curvy, lively and surprising, inviting spontaneous journeys that can lead to unexpected moments in space and time. They are not straight. They shape and are shaped by the landscape they inhabit, always keen on slowing down and making a pause for chance encounters. 

Interested in following these directions, Feral Gift invites varied groups of (other-than-) human contributors to gather sensory impressions and embodied reflections of their surroundings and exchange them with each other as gifts. The collective gifting exchange is performed and repeated in Loops, around themes proposed by each group (see e.g. the Loop #1 on Becoming Eco-Social Change. The Gift connects various creatures and knowledges in shared moments of feral inquiry, hoping to make visible what might otherwise go unnoticed.
The Feral Gift unfolds through the structure of Loops performed by various groups of human and other-than-human contributors. Each Loop explores a different theme chosen by each group: the initial Loop #1 revolved around the theme Becoming Eco-Social change, the currently ongoing Loop #2 brings together moments across diverse multispecies times, and Loop #3 focuses on everyday spectacles.

Loop 1


Becoming Eco-Social Change


Initiated as part of the Uroboros 2022 festival programme, the first Feral Gift Loop brought together artists, designers, researchers, and social change-makers of various backgrounds to reflect on and performatively enact their diverse experiences of eco-social change.   The Loop started from the observation that eco-social events and crises manifest differently across diversely situated social contexts, and there are no universal approaches or solutions. The group of six contributors explored theoretical narratives of change through various everyday, embodied, and sensory activities: They touched, smelled, tasted, listened to, and felt what something as abstract and scalable as eco-social change might mean to each of them. 

What could the complex notion of eco-social change mean across different personal, professional, and cultural contexts? What feelings, meanings, and imaginaries are associated with it? What does it take to ‘become’ eco-social change? How could this sound, smell, look, or taste like?

Each week, one member of the group selected a guiding narrative (for example, from books, poems, songs, folktales) capturing resonant elements of change and devised a prompt for a situated enactment to be performed by the rest of the group in their current space-time locations: for example, a kitchen in Helsinki, an art space in Tokyo, a living room in Colombia, a forest patch in Umeå, a mountain in Edinburgh, a cottage in Bohemia, an elevator in Newcastle, a home in Seoul, a seacoast near Seville…

The group captured their enactments through various formats including short films, poems, letters, songs, drawings, and recipes and shared these with each other as gifts. This shared documentation, together with the seeding narratives and prompts, formed key elements of their practice-based inquiry. All 30 gifts that emerged from this Feral Gift loop – as performative embodiments of eco-social change – are shared here in this online archive to inspire further reflection and prompt future loops performed by others. 


Loop 2



Multispecies Sensemaking


Capturing moments of multispecies co-existence, where human and other-than-human lives come together in an intentional attempt to understand and make sense with each other. Moving together, following each other's time, to the point when we meet. 

By Cyane Findji, Myriam Gras , Tereza Lišková, Markéta Dolejšová & Chewie

We are looping and will get back soon.  

Loop 3


Finding Everyday Spectacles


Foraging for spectacular moments of everydaylife co-existence in Finnish forests, gardens, and street corners. 

Coming soon.