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 4
guided by
Felipe G. Gil
ContributorsAnn Light
Danielle Wilde
Iryna Zamuruieva
Martyna Miller
Open Forest Collective
Score

You have been walking peacefully in a crustacean cemetery. What will you say to Sandy Cheeks* and their friends?

Score References

10 grains of sand

  1. I was born on an island. 41 years ago.

  2. At 18, when I moved to Seville, I realized I missed the sea a lot.
     
  3. I like sports. All kinds of them. That's why my first reaction when I think about 'scores' I imagine first the result of a match (Serena Williams or Carlos Alcaraz, for example). 

  4. On the beach I've enjoyed playing informal sports. Firstly as a kid, now as a father of two girls.

  5. I love winning but I am generally a loser.

  6. This summer I've been listening to an artist whose entire album is on Youtube with a 3D moving view at the beach of him as his friends. There is one song called Después de la playa (After the beach) that I've played non stop on my devices. During the Creatures Festival I even crossed with my car close to where Marketa and Andrea were and I put the volume crazily up just on 1'09''.

  7. I once made a short film which was recorded on a Fuerteventura beach. It was called: "The Mirror Theory". Yes, it was a bit pretentious. No, you can't watch it because we used to upload all of our videos to a platform that, being a private company as they are, decided to stop hosting videos. We had 1.000 videos uploaded there. We saved them on a hard disk which was later corrupted. We lost all those memories. But somehow, I guess, it's not that bad. Because there is enough crap on the Internet, right?

  8. This summer, I came back to Fuerteventura, as always. And we went to a really small museum in the south. There we found a guy who was an expert on the history of the island. He told us that eastern islands such as Fuerteventura or Lanzarote are lower because they are slowly being submerged. The island is collapsing slowly. This image was powerful enough to be shared. But then the guy told us something more: "and that's why this island is well known for our beaches". Because once the island is sinking, this sends to the surface many crustaceans. And once they die, they become sand.

  9. Suddenly I realized that, walking on a beach, is certainly walking on a crustacean cemetery. 

  10. And since I'm obsessed with popular imageries, mainstream narratives and remix culture I just wonder how a sci-fi imagination produces stories in between the death and the alive, the animated and the still, all those crustacean souls and your thoughts. Your turn. Hurry up, we are losing.

* I hate footnotes but here we are. Using them to make you smile (and also discover who the hell is Sandy Cheeks)

Ann LightFormat:  .txt
Location: Ann's
Date: 2022
“How did this become awkward?” I asked the bird, but it flew away.

“Did I do something?” I asked the water, but it fell through my hands.

“What is broken?” I asked the cliff, but it rose, indifferent to me. 

“Why am I less?” I asked the campion, the daisy and the gorse. 

“Why?” With lurching heart: “Why?” and only the sand, that crustacean cemetery, answered.

“You broke faith,” it sang, sliding through the ages, ever one, ever different; only sand.
Open Forest CollectiveFormat:  .jpg, .mp4, .txt
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Date: 2022

Fema RecipeThis potion is inspired by Felipe’s score for Feral Gift @ Uroboros 2022. The recipe starts with a long walk around the Baltic shore of Mustikkamma island, Helsinki, on a sunny Sunday. While these two ingredients were tested and work well for the recipe, we imagine you can go with any shore, island, and weather of your choice. Go and wander and wonder with your multi-species neighbours. Important part of the Crustacean Cemetery is a memory (lived or imagined) of Venice summer and of Sevillian humour. These two ingredients shall not be replaced. Think of Venice, the romantic dancing of humans and crustaceans alike on its slow-sinking mass; find someone who knows the hot humour of Sevilla and ask them to share at least a small piece. t’s refreshing, playful, and healing. We can’t recommend enough. Last but not least, find someone around with a kind experimental spirit to help you shake your inspirations and add a dash of more – perhaps surprising – colour; like our new friend tending the bar at Femma IV in Kalllio. The potion is ready. Have it with someone you care about/for, imagined, self, or otherwise.

Mix2 x Aperol
1.2 x Campari
0.5 x soda water
Ice cubes
A slice of orange
3 x Prosecco (Cava also okay on any day, but especially today)

ServeWith a straw & a pinch salt on the drinker’s palm (posh flavoured salt is wanky & okay)

DrinkWhile holding salt in your palm, shuffle with your other hand, foot, or other means, your
choice of a tarot deck (we used Serpentine for Uroboros and other reasons).
Pick a card. Open. Discuss aloud, even when alone.
Lick the salt off your palm.
Lie down.
Take a good sip of the libation through the straw.
Feel it.
Shuffle the tarot deck and pick a card, open, and look at it. Discussion optional.
Continue as you desire.
Martyna MillerFormat:  .mp4
Location: Martyna's
Date: 2022

Danielle WildeFormat:  .txt
Location: Umeå, Sweden
Date: 2022
Remembering Water

I’ve been looking at pictures of the ocean lately. I grew up between the mountains and the sea, so the longing for the ocean is always there, but it has become more pointed lately, because of a confluence of ‘things’: a friend posted images of a beach with waves (on fb) that reminded me of home and started an exchange of waves and thinking and washing and writing. Hurricane Ian hitting landfall in various countries, leaving a trail of unevenly reported devastation. The river where I now live, which is wide and glorious and fast moving – walking beside it, looking at it whenever I can, and always, always, always thinking about swimming in it.

I feel for Florida, but what about Cuba? 
What about Pakistan and the 33 million displaced?
What about Tuvalu?
And the list goes on.

My mum tried to explain what it was like to go out in the rain when 100ml fell in an hour. She said the air was like a solid wall of water; a wall of water but somehow she could breathe. She went outside to get the chickens in, or to feed the goats; to do something with the creatures that shared the land.

When I look to the beaches I grew up with, I can’t help wondering will they be the same if I ever get home? Beaches are always moving but somehow we recognise them. I can’t help wondering though if anything will be the same; if that recognition might slip from my grasp. 

I know from experience that we hold the memory of water in the cells of our bodies. I understand from science that the molecular shape of water can change.
We can change too… and I know that we want to… the work of imagining what that will look like is so critical, a bit elusive. We must do everything we can.
Iryna ZamuruievaFormat:  .jpg, .txt
Location: North Sea
Date: 2022

[UA]
Все перемішане під поверхнею
Ракоподібні, що мільйонами років перетворюються на пісок
Мамині колискові, арпеджіо Філіпа Гласа, нео-барокко
Гвоздики, що їх несла на розпис, на якому ніхто не крикнув “я проти!”
Свіжо-відкопані, напів-розкладені, вбиті іншими людьми люди,
Непроговорені теми,
Бомби уповільненої дії,
Чиїсь турботи, відклеєні вії, паспорти, цукерки, пластикові пакети, меми, похорони, весілля
Заговорюю, щоб всі вони вибухнули конфетті,
а не частинами чиїхсь життів
(може навіть наших)
Рухаюся обережно, складно бачити напрямок
Не ясно, хто і кого ще врятує
Підземний червяк Lithoredo abatanica
з’їсть камінь
зробить пісок
Його майбутнє у нього в роті
І в нас теж
Тому, говори, будь ласка, коли ходиш цим кладовищем ракоподібних,
Кажи їм дякую, прошу, пробач, пробач, пробач
До останньої піщинки і, можливо,
Можливо вони таки пробачать

Все це насправді взагалі не про тебе
Але земля обертається навколо своєї осі
І я знов бачу твоє обличчя у контурі суші,
Що торкається Північного моря,
Дякую, прошу, пробач, пробач, пробач
[EN]
Everything is mixed up under the surface
Crustaceans, that for millions of years have been turning into sand,
Mama’s lullabies, arpeggio from Philip Glass, neo-baroque,
Carnations carried to the registrar, where no one shouted “I object!”
Freshly unearthed, half-decomposed people killed by other people, 
Untalked through topics, 
Time bombs, 
Someone’s troubles, unglued eyelashes, passports, candies, plastic bags, memes, funerals, weddings,
I am putting a spell on them to explode with confetti 
And not with pieces of someone’s lives
(maybe even ours)
I am moving carefully, hard to see the direction
It’s unclear who will rescue whom
Underground worm Lithoredo botanica
Will eat rock
And make sand
Their future is in their mouth
And in ours too
So, speak, please, as you walk this crustacean cemetery,
Tell them thank you, welcome, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
Until the last grain of sand and maybe, 
maybe they will forgive you

All this is really not about you
But the earth is turning around its axis
And I see your face again in the outline of the land
That touches the North Sea
Thank you, welcome, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
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