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. 

Contributors

Open Forest Collective


Loop 1: Becoming Eco-Social ChangeWebsite
Open Forest Collective is a multispecies group of creative practitioners and researchers experimenting with feral approaches to engaging with more-than-human ecologies such as forests, wetlands, and cities.
The Collective’s creative activities – experimental walking, drifting, storytelling, and co-creation of feral datasets – bring together scientists, artists, citizens, policymakers, Indigenous forest guardians as well as dogs and trees in an experiential knowledge exchange. The work is distributed across different locations, including (what is known today as) Finland, Australia, the Czech Republic, and Colombia. Current members of the Collective include Andrea Botero, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi and Chewie.

Contributions


Danielle Wilde


Loop 1: Becoming Eco-Social ChangeWebsite
Danielle is a professor of Design for Sustainability at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden, and Associate Professor, Sustainability Transitions, at SDU, Denmark, where she leads research into food system transformation, and coordinate local efforts on the H2020 FUSILLI project.
Across both institutions, her research and teaching raise questions around the social, ecological and material sustainability of human action, and the roles that design might play therein. Danielle uses experimental methods to examine how embodied engagement with the materiality of the world can assist people in thinking in new ways; develop new possibilities for future action that can be implemented today; alternative responses to challenges we face, whether these are planetary in scale or concern the nature within us. She uses performative and probiotic methods, participatory and speculative research through design, to open up new ways of thinking, through moving, making and doing. She undertakes pedagogical research, to infrastructure new roles for design in the twenty-first century, including through biodesign and designing with living things. Her work challenges the role of designer as a maker of things: products, cultural artefacts or services, positing that it is, rather, to examine relationships and dependencies, and do as little as possible; leverage participatory and co-creative design methods to help people to infrastructure their own agency, understand what they need to regenerate the world around them, and take action so that humans and non-humans alike might flourish. Much of this work is focused on food and more-than-human health.

Contributions



Iryna Zamuruieva


Loop 1: Becoming Eco-Social Change Website
Iryna S. Zamuruieva makes images, writes, walks, organises and performs.
Originally from the edge of the steppe and forest-steppe in Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine, Iryna now lives by the North Sea coast in Edinburgh, Scotland. Across her work she explores human-environmental relationships through research, curating, photography, collage and gatherings of all sorts: sensory group walks & counter mapping, street interventions, mourning ceremonies. Most recently she has been working on land, resilience and climate justice at a sustainability charity in Scotland; curating Climate Art Labs, an interdisciplinary collaboration exploring the meanings and impacts of climate change in Ukrainian environments; and writing about the eco-feminist thought in Ukraine. Her writing has been published in the South/South Dialogues, Commons, Open Democracy and Scottish Left Review amongst others.

Contributions



Ann Light


Loop 1: Becoming Eco-Social Change  Website
  
Ann Light is a design researcher and interaction theorist, specializing in participatory practice, human-technology relations and collaborative future-making.
Her 25-year research career has focused on the politics, ethics and agency of design, and especially co-design in communities, exploring social activism at neighbourhood level, investigating the design of sharing structures and questioning the boundaries of participation. Regarding the social and ecological as inextricably linked, over the last few years she has turned to consider climate collapse and the stress that current systems put on the planet, believing creative remaking of relations is needed for liveable futures and looking at ways that socially engaged art and design can find potential in difficult places and offer visions of fairer worlds. She co-led research on the European Union project Creative Practices for Transformative Futures (CreaTures).

Contributions



Martyna Miller


Loop 1: Becoming Eco-Social Change
Martyna Miller is an interdisciplinary artist, director and anthropologist, studied at the University of Warsaw and University of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, received her doctorate in fine arts at the University of Arts in Poznan.
Co-founder of duo Polanki and TYNA collective. Since 2018, she has been co-running the DOMIE project in Poznań, an experimental endeavor on the border of art, architecture and social sciences. In her projects she explores the relationship between memory and body. Through memories and their reconstructions she creates methods to work with the mediality of experience. She is interested in the relationship between nature and community in the processes of healing, production and transformation. Her project are often long term investigations, gathering different groups and perspectives to search for collectively developed knowledges and experience communities. She uses video, performance, sound and more. Her works are often cycles, collections, gestures, fragments of broader explorations.

Contributions


Felipe G. Gil


Loop 1: Becoming Eco-Social ChangeWebsite
Felipe G. Gil works at ZEMOS98, a 26-year-old non-profit organization dedicated to cultural mediation.
He coordinated Commonspoly, an open-source board game that fosters a culture of cooperation, and currently coordinates Proxymo, a media education and internet culture program for the Spanish art and school network PLANEA. Lately, he has been exploring the connection between health and culture. He was the mediator for Concomitentes Pediatric ICU, a project highlighted on the EU platform Culture for Health. He is now developing a project for cancer patients, exploring how the arts can offer emotional support. He is the co-editor of the book Source Code: The Remix (2009) and writes about memes, TikToks, and viral incidents for elDiario.es. A Star Wars fan, avid racket sports player, and a father against the patriarchy.

Contributions