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. 
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.