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. 

Open Forest Collective climbing, enacting a prompt.
The Feral Gift experiment was initiated in 2022 by Markéta Dolejšová and Danielle Wilde for the occasion of the Uroboros Festivaland brought to life together with Ann Light, Felipe G. Gil, Iryna Zamuruieva, Martyna Miller, and the Open Forest Collective.
 
Developed through the structure of Loops that are performed by various groups of contributors – human and others – the Feral Gift acts as an experimental sensemaking practice that offers glimpses into diverse shapes, flows, and rhythms of everyday more-than-human experiences. 

The Feral Gift exchange unfolds as a looped process of prompting and enacting, where one contributor shares a prompt (instruction score) to be reflected and enacted – narrated, sang, danced, cooked, or else – by the rest of the group. The documentation of these enactments – as poems, songs, videos, photos, recipes, edible dishes, and more – are shared within the group as gifts. 

Each Feral Gift Loop brings together a different group of contributors, around a theme that they wish to explore (see e.g. the initial Loop on ‘Becoming Eco-Social change’).
Supported By
Aalto University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture Kone Foundation and Uroboros Festival

Website DesignJuan Guevara Verjel



If you wish to organise your own Feral Gift Loop, feel free to do it, 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 and let’s see where we go.