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. 
Open Forest CollectiveFormat:  .jpg
Location: Nezabudice, Central Bohemia
Date: 2022

Score by Italo Calvino ft. Google Translator:


(This could be a karaoke text; sing it together with your kins, to your favorite tune.  We sung it to “Skákal pes přes oves”.  Before you do that, go to a forest and listen to the mushrooms.)

things hiding 
under 
the thick 
jungle canopy
only careful foragers 
find them
big-deal kind of things

thoretical ideas 
with a thick wig 
how funny
and sweaty
and itchy

you know the feeling
when you speak
too much 
or too little?
cause you’re scared 
that the forest will
just 
stop 
listening

big things
entangled things
I go to the forest
ask the mushroom
they’re not 
always 
there

sometimes they 
show up

in their soft wigs
living in bonds
we can only 
dream of

I listen
in silence
and then sing

(Oh) so there’s no 
singular reason 
for the world to be?
here,
talk to the mushroom
listen
wait
listen.