Feral Incursions
Central European University Budapest
11-12 May 2018
A two-day intensive exploring the polyvalent theoretical and practical facets of the feral through art, politics and ecology organized by the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative (EAH) at Central European University, Budapest.
This series of workshops sets out to interrogate the feral as a material and figurative entity that troubles the ordinary realms of arts, politics, and ecology. On the one hand, feral animals and plants are often accused of invading natural ecologies and civilized spaces, yet the zealous control of these organisms has also provoked tensions between environmentalists, pastoralists and agriculturalists, as well as economic and cultural agencies. On the other hand, the feral designation has often been deployed as a trope for those who cross geopolitical and sexual-racial borders – such as migrants, people of color, and people with disabilities – invoking a necessity to control their mobility, inhabitance and reproductivity.
The feral has however been more affirmatively approached within streams of environmental thought that recognize its agency in reactivating dormant natural processes in denuded Anthropocene landscapes through planned or undirected instances of rewilding. The concept of feralizing has also been invoked as a device to critically reanimate wildness and reclaim liminality in feminist, queer, and other critical social theories. The feral has also been explored in artistic practices as a tactics to uncover mechanisms of fascist and colonial domination, as well as to test out post-capitalist forms of exchange. This kind of reclamation helps us to mobilize the ambivalence and tension that the feral entails as a potential space for transspecies and cosmopolitical reflections and alliances.
This series of workshops led by artists, writers, political theorists and urban foragers investigates the feral as a transgressive force with the power to corrode and infract anthropocentric and patriarchal systems, as well as through the actual entanglements of ferality in the streams of artistic, political and ecological practice. Could ferality be a useful concept for theory and practice against species extinction? How can poetry provide a language to express this loss and imagine more-than-human futures? What is the place of the feral in the urban environment and how can it become a source of physical and spiritual nourishment? Could the excavation of a fragment of intertwined political and natural history trigger a critical stance towards the present? How can ferality be deployed to infiltrate and subvert economic networks? In what way could the concept of feral citizenship allow us to navigate the current political moment?
While there is no charge for participation, workshop numbers are limited, and pre-registration is required. To apply please send a short statement by Friday 27 April explaining why you would like to take part and how you would benefit to eah@ceu.edu
This workshop is part of the programme of the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative at Central European University and is organised in collaboration with Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art.
For workshop details see:
http://translocal.org/feral/index.html
SCHEDULE
Friday 11 May
9.00 Introduction
9.30-11.30
The Life Story of Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak and Other Matters of Survival, 2017
Workshop leader: Christian Kosmas Mayer
EAH organisers: Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Christian Mayer travelled to LA to find the tree given as a potted plantlet to Afro-American high jump champion Cornelius Johnson, along with all the other gold medal winners, at the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Berlin. What could be the future of the saplings that the artist has preserved in-vitro?
12.00-14.00
Feral Citizenship: Roving the Democratic Terrain
Workshop leader: Nick Garside
EAH organiser: Alan Watt
This workshop examines the intersection between democracy, desire and disruption, exploring feral citizenship as a hopeful and pleasurable way of occupying and creating democratic terrain.
15.00-19.00
Feral in the City: Exploring the Wild Edges and Valuing the Marginal in a Human-made Environment
Workshop leaders: Claude Oprea
EAH organiser: Guntra Aistara
You are invited on a magical journey of discovery and connection with some of the wild plants in the city of Budapest. What can we learn from their untamed nature, resilience and healing powers to inform our present and write a better story for our futures?
Note: This workshop will take place both on the university site and around the city of Budapest.
Saturday 12 May
10.00-12.00
Feral Trade
Workshop leader: Kate Rich
EAH organisers: Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Artist and trader Kate Rich has been playing with the nature of the feral in business over 15 years, primarily through the Feral Trade project, an artist-run grocery business trading coffee and other goods over social networks and outside commercial systems (http://feraltrade.org). She will report on her findings and invite a conversation into how we might extend the notion of the feral into how we do business more broadly.
13.00-15.00
Poetry, Birds, and the Feral from Medieval to Modern
Workshop leaders: Clara Dawson and Petra Bakos Jarrett
EAH organisers: Hyaesin Yoon and Marianna Szczygielska
This workshop will take a series of poems across the centuries, including ancient Greek, classical Arabic, medieval and modern British poetry, which feature birds inhabiting the borderline between human and animal, between the civilised and the wild. What can these poetic birds tell us about how attitudes to the feral have changed across the centuries?
15.00-16.00
Feral Intensive Roundup
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