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. 
Week 2
guided by
Martyna Miller
ContributorsAnn Light
Danielle Wilde
Felipe G. Gil
Iryna Zamuruieva ft. Open Forest C.
Score

Climb something up. 
Have a good look from the top. 
What can you see? 
And how? 
Does the breathing feel thinner? Safe? 
Can you hold it? 
Read this geography carefully. 
Remember it.
Let it freeeeeeeze.


Score References

The Dragon Gate
Folktale

There were thousands of koi swimming up the Yellow River in Japan*. They swam for a very long time upriver. The huge group eventually reached a tall and pounding waterfall. Most of the Koi were scared away by the great height and noise of the waterfall and turned back down river. However, three hundred and sixty of the strongest Koi, were determined to reach the top of the waterfall.

For hundreds of years, these brave, strong Koi tried to jump to the top of the waterfall, their beautiful, shiny scales flashing, and winking in the sunshine. Some local demons, attracted by the splashing, and shining of the beautiful koi, amused themselves by raising the height of the waterfall, to make it more difficult for the Koi. Each time a fish would get close to the top, the demons would raise the waterfall higher.

After some time passed, one Koi finally made it to the top. The Gods rewarded the koi by turning him into a beautiful, shiny, Golden Dragon. He now spends his time chasing among the clouds in the heavens, gathering pearls of wisdom.

Since then, when a Koi makes it to the top of the waterfalls in the Yellow River, he is rewarded by being transformed into a Dragon.

* Originally in China, but this is the interesting variation found on the web.



Japanese Proverb

及ばぬ鯉の滝登り 
(waterfall climbs of feeble koi).   


Fragment of the film Memory Carp (2022) by Martyna Miller.


Koi traditional graphics.
Koi traditional graphics.
Koi traditional graphics.
Koi traditional graphics.
Koi traditional graphics.
Picture of me with my stepdaughter.
Quote from Haruka Kudo exhibition / Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2022
Quote from Haruka Kudo exhibition / Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2022 (translation).




Iryna Zamuruieva
Open Forest Collective
Format:  .jpg, .mp4, .txt
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
Date: 2022




IZ week 2 note 🌊☁️🦪

Не бійся водоспадів, пірнай в них з головою
Ходи крихким льодом, пливи крізь білу воду
Нічого не лишай на потім, особливо любові
Демони ближче, ніж здаються
Летять до нас на плескіт і сяйво
Але не хвилюйся, ми з ними потоваришуємо
Пригостимо водоростями, пирогом з ожиною, зеленим чаєм
Вони нам віддячать – 
Перетворять на Золотих Драконів
І будемо поміж хмар збирати перли мудрості
У цьому дивному місці 
У цій дивній воді

4 вересня



Ann LightFormat:  .mp4
Location: Newcastle, England
Date: 2022



Felipe G. GilFormat: .mp4
Location: Seville, Spain
Date: 2022



Danielle WildeFormat:  .jpg
Location: Danielle's
Date: 2022