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. 
Ann LightFormat:  .txt
Location: Brighton, UK
Date: 2022

(1) IncidentalsI play Bowie’s Sense of Doubt and Simple Minds’ Theme for Great Cities. Songs of alienation. I talk to the Arsenal fan at the bar. Yes, we both saw matches at Highbury. He nearly kisses my hand when I leave. He shakes it. We have talked about the Queen but I am feeling more like Judi Dench. An old dame, anyway.
Did I put off coming to Poland for so many years because it reminds me of my granny? Particularly my granny… (I am now nearly as old as my granny!) … and other things. But the train journey from Berlin is unremarkable. We cross a river, The Oder, and we are now able to take our facemasks off and breathe again. I wasn’t expecting that release.

I notice that the pedestrian lights favour cars here. I notice that the lift at the hotel is not tuned to cope with 11 floors. I wait around a lot, watching and sizing up. It seems friendly.

The fruit flies that hugged us in Berlin have disappeared so it wasn’t the plums. I have brought the plums from Dresden as an offering. Dresden is full of baroque beauty along the Elbe. It is not like Coventry, despite its fate in World War II. It must have been quite the seat of Saxony power. Anyway, it turns out 2kg of plums is enough to hurt a shoulder when combined with the pink terror. But it’s fewer plums now as I gave some to Sabine on the way through…

The pink terror has stayed with Sabine, who is off to play cards with the competitive elements in her institute and still win. Someone threw a pack at her for outsmarting them last time they went together on a residential. I will miss the stories of her stay in the country, merely visiting her flat to reclaim the pink tyranny before my next journey, while she is tirelessly, reluctantly bonding with her team. 

I am in a country where I may understand less than in Finland. Is that a new marker for this trip? I know one word. It means ‘good’. I can’t use it by itself unless I am answering someone. I am looking at the language for the first time, it seems, despite hearing it: from a friend talking to her parents; from a grandmother who lapsed into a different tongue as she was ready to die. I can see terms have come into the language from elsewhere. I enjoy their embellishment with long suffixes. 

From Helsinki, after a free day where I never get beyond second hand shops and restless wandering, I take the ferry. It is the size to dwarf a coastline. It is Saturday night but I resist my (mild) curiosity about the nightclubs, having been to the buffet. At least at the buffet, there were crustaceans.

I enjoy spectacular views of clouds over sea and then clouds over sea and green islands. It goes on for hours. I don’t bother with the curtains at the window.

In Finland, I discovered the efficacy of my Swedish to read daily life. In Stockholm, we might assume I can grasp even more, but I am in the hands of Daniel P. and all that that entails and he is telling me about his plan to become a court jester. I have been staying in a hostel and the shrillest fire alarm sounds for a solid 10 minutes outside the toilet in which I happen to be locked. It is not safe to venture into the noise. At KTH, where I meet him, they are also testing the alarms and I fear for my ears. Is it National Fire Alarm Testing Day? I believe that Sweden could have such a thing. My hearing is battered all morning, one way or another.

My walk to the T-bana on the second day is joyous, taking me past tiny houses on small allotment style portions of land. There is a burst of sun. If allotments are good, these are funkier. I want a Swedish summerhouse. I do. 

And then I am in Berlin, briefly, at another hostel. This one has aggressive notices. I am not allowed to do things. That’s fine. I go to supper and then I go to bed. It is simple. The room is spacious, calm and clean. But the ladies toilets are on the opposite side of the quadrant and I always visit them at some point in the dark, the late hours, the point where nearly everyone is asleep but some youngsters are still talking, looking up, noticing I am in coat and nightshirt. “That’s it,” I think, but not out loud. “You get older and you go wandering about in the small hours. Yes.” The things I think when wondering about at night.

For a moment I consider whether the electronic check-in system has a sense of the hostel layout. Does it assign rooms in order of arrival? Does it do spite? I was once given a room with a broken heating system because I didn’t smile at the reception desk. I smile now. The system spits out Room 38: directly opposite the men’s toilets and showers. It doesn’t know that you inevitably set off the hand-drier when you move awkwardly in washing. It wasn’t tormenting me. 

So I am playing Bowie’s Berlin period and feeling that a lot of water has passed under that bridge. I saw Bowie in 1978, sleek in wide trews and a neat shirt, just after all the fuss was over. Heroes. In a quiet spotlight. Perhaps the best of all moments. Perhaps not. 

I am reminded of that change of direction as if something has walked over our graves. 

All this Europe. Sexy. Crumpled. Full of language.  

Train journeys. 

Keys.


(2) BelongingI visit two places where I am shown a haven for other energies and ways of being. 

The first is a co-working space in Stockholm. The aesthetic is accentuated alternative - a peach chaise longue in a room with peach walls and a large working table; a chandelier in makeshift mockery of a boardroom; lush corners for radical making and talking. It is the take-over of an old factory by the docks far from the centre of town. The rent is low - Laura found it for the collective when they had to move last time, when they grew up from squatters to social enterprise. People pay a subscription and share, tidy and love the place as members. I hear stories of travelling across the city to be present, but also of the intimidating coolness of the makers. The friendships transcend the mood: powerful women building a container city full of entrepreneurs; a secret restaurant; a clothes swap hanging between the doorways; a home to raised beds and balconies and other signs of collaborative labour. It defies the clean efforts of the corporate offices and working spaces of a town that needs to be tidy. Stockholm needs this because it is Stockholm.

Laura is keen to show me this. She has found (perhaps made) a place of connection, a long walk across a big field from where she has settled back into Sweden and full of people who have no deep roots here. Few voices hold the Stockholm twang and English is ubiquitous, not just because it is the Swedish second tongue. It is everyone’s second tongue here.

My second encounter with home-making... I am in Poznan at Domie (“at home”) on a formal visit, billed as a special guest and probably terrifying the locals from attending. English is not a lingua franca. I listen to how people are speaking. The neighbours are shy of their few words. The others speak in a mix of Russian with the Belarusians and Polish between one another, before precise but tentative translations for me. The picnic brings together different worlds, the building’s old and eccentric neighbours, newcomers and transients, the performance artists, makers and waifs who identify with the queerness here and have adopted Domie for their exhibition space. 

It is a scruffy set of rooms, a piece of Poland’s cinematic history but now a place of pigeons and car engines, flight paths, dust and concrete. A sparrow pecks. A fly. A dead-limbed rose is struggling on and the nasturtiums on the cake are descendants from those grown earlier in the summer in the collective gardening that lasted a few weeks. We eat them.

The picnics and the gardening turn the grey into bountiful colours. 

Martyna wears all purple, Gosia’s sweatshirt is purple too and the carpets, rugs and chairs are bold and turquoise, yellow and orange. People show me Instagram accounts powerful with images of distorted bodies and sounds of life dedicated to resisting the lines around them. Domie is remixed in scrap books and installations, an object of gaze as much as the performers round it. I walk through someone’s diploma project where panels clang with digital sounds when I touch them and a heavy electronic breathing pervades everything and feeds into the quiet of the picnic as a rhythm to the day.

In Dresden, my presentation is called “This will not be Tidy” and I show pictures of disputed wall art near my home. Home-from-home…


(3) BordersThis passage is short. I pass through four countries and there are no visible borders. I sit on trains, planes and boats and walk off them. No one asks for documentation. I am sitting at an airport now and I am finally on the other side of the invisible line that skirts much of Europe, trusting our intentions. I am waiting to fly to the country that chose to be outside this.

This is long and coming. I return to a country where a new hard-right government is destroying social fabric for their personal gain. I have passed through Sweden where, this week, they accepted a right-wing coalition, their fascists second in the national polls. I spent a day in Poland, a country that withholds identity rights from those deemed transgressive, where the mainstream is easy to shock and the expectations are shocking. I read of Italy selecting the far-right to make a government, with prioritization for citizens, whatever that dog-whistles to its supporters. I talked to Germans about the nation’s definition of anti-semitism, which itself seems anti-semitic, and we discuss the falling popularity of the AfD in the east. That, at least, is something.

I think of moments that I have been trapped in long queues to show my eligibility, hoping that I will again be allowed to enjoy the things I have assembled round me at home, whatever that means. It never feels certain. 

I am allowed on the plane back to the UK.
(4) CharmHe catches me at dusk as we walk from community garden to the conference supper and falls into step. He is boyish but not young and a curious mix of Spanish and Norwegian, one of the few people here with no German. He has missed the work of the day, coming by train from Oslo and arriving late, but how late we don’t know and don’t ask because he has missed the other keynotes and he knows that is bad form. He has a quick humour that fills his eyes and makes it fun to talk. His lightness is unlike the sobriety and pomp of the, mostly, Germans. 

We part for supper, picking up later, conspiratorially at the closing notes, to share a walk to the hotel and it is a pleasant 30 minute walk through the dark park, a walk that holds more appeal with a companion and especially one with charm. We talk about the weaknesses of ecological economics and what the audience at this conference will appreciate. It is a mixed group - no way to win, no way to lose; someone will be interested somewhere. We talk about what to say when you have lost faith in your arguments. He has been booked for a particular perspective, he says. I don’t know why I have been booked, I say.

Over breakfast, we talk more and then walk fast to the strangely-named but beautiful German Hygiene Museum for the second day, where I place him in the hands of the organizers and go check my mail. His talk is accomplished and I learn more about ecological economics, but his ambivalence to his own materials appears in the questions and I recognize that he is becoming a CreaTure, though he doesn’t yet know it. 

I tell him with sincerity that his presentation was engaging and agree, yes, it did show that he no longer is convinced by his own rhetoric, but not in conveying it. It was in the moment that he confessed so in the questions. His eyes light up and he seems pleased.

At lunch, I am arguing about temporalities with a large German professor with a desire to manage unruly types of time. We stray into the bad politics of Documenta, how the art exhibition just closing may have unleashed a national crisis of identity. I only catch sight of my companion in the distance on another floor and, when I go to say goodbye, he is already gone. 

Back in my room, I discover he has nearly twenty-five thousand citations for work he no longer believes in.


(5) FoodMartyna has made the best cheesecake in the world. She has also made a fine carrot cake, also gluten free. And there are my plums and some heavy buckwheat-and-fig bread I brought from Stockholm – heavy, both to eat and to carry.

The breakfast at Hotel Altus Old Town is the best too. There are salads of cauliflower and radish, spiced chicken and a spinach-and-banana smoothie, as well as the European hotel essentials of watermelon, eggs, sliced meats and cheese, coffee, hot water and cereals. 

In Berlin, I have glass noodles on my first and last day and it makes me happy, so perhaps I seek something that only appears in Vietnamese food. There is beetroot risotto and licorishly black buckwheat bread with Cassie. With Kit, the Turkish omelette is girded with fruit, olives, honeyed yoghurt and salad, like a Middle Eastern thali.

In Stockholm, Airi, Chiara and I gather over a Lebanese feast and drink a wine that tastes of sandalwood and Mediterranean berries. It costs 670 SEK a bottle. Laura buys me an ice cream of yuzu sorbet and Marrakesh, a fragrant orange flower, saffron and pistachio. 

On the ferry, I salute the waves with a longeru brought from Finland, that mix of sweet grapefruit and gin that is good in saunas, but goes well in my drop-down living quarters across the northern archipelagos.

In Dresden, there is a day when everything at the conference has potato, aubergine or wheat in it and I run away to the supermarket and buy chicken, grated carrot and beet to eat in my hotel room.

I go to the opera and watch parties dine at high tables surrounded by glistening champagne flutes. It feels festive, but the story we are here to see is of starving artists who live by fooling the landlord and cheating a rich old man and I wonder with whom the audience identifies.

I have travelled with apples from my tree and the last of the summer’s apricots; I leave with another heavy buckwheat loaf in my luggage. There is nothing for the birds.


(6) PatienceIn the end, I take the path of least resistance. In the end, I make like water. I queue a lot. I carry my world on my arm. I am forever grateful to Sabine for taking my pink suitcase. I carry it down six flights and up and down eight, but just the once.
I take trams where there are trams and walk as many places as are reasonable in the time. I choose paths through the green parts on the map. I meet trees. I fall into step. I keep my documents in a pocket with my glasses, hung from my neck. I check two phones and ask directions. I get lost but I don’t miss major connections. I am on time. I keep everyone up to date. Eventually, I arrive.
(7) PrivateThere are thoughts that I have about Europe as I lose myself in folds of history and make believe, about Europe as an phantom thought, what it has meant and might mean. What it might mean for people and creatures of all types and creeds, wherever here is at any moment and conversely what is there. It might be or it might not be. Things hang more precariously now. I think these thoughts and they think me, bound up with great railway stations, a promise of distance and displacement, of new scents and vistas, of ends, of clinking trucks, of a small suitcase once and a hope lived and dashed. In the end, these thoughts, even shared, cannot be shared.
There are doors to open before the whistle.

Baggage to manage.

Keys to receive.

Places. Debts. Time.