In this lecture, Fiona MacDonald introduces her work with Feral Practice, which seeks creative ways to unpick the anthropocentric urge to mastery over the creaturely, and asks: how is the binary of the wild versus the tame disturbed and entangled by the line of flight that is the feral?
Vibrant material meetings and exchanges occur at every level of our bodies and worlds but often go unregarded or unknown. If we sensitize ourselves (as vegetal philosopher Michael Marder advises) to the fuzzy edges of our subjectivity in order to meet beings very different to ourselves, might it actually be in the ‘wilds’ of the imagination that we can re-align with nonhuman nature? Feral Practice’s work with social insects, especially wood ants, informs their suggestion that all wild space engages with complex lively ordering systems, which are less legible to human observers because they do not necessarily take us into account. Ants are keystone species of woodlands. They orchestrate vegetal life and dominate the forest floor whilst operating aphid farms in trees. Might the feral artist be also under the control of the ants?
Adorno’s negative dialectics, Eduardo Kohn’s forest that thinks, and Jane Bennett’s vibrant materiality. We will work with shifts of perception, close attention, speculation, imagination, and improvisation to engage deeply and queerly with nonhuman beings, to perceive them and ourselves in new ways.
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects and interdisciplinary events that develop ethical and imaginative connection across species boundaries. Their research draws on artistic, scientific and subjective knowledge practices to explore diverse aesthetics and create suggestive spaces of unknowing nature. Recent projects include: Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit, a film exploring human power and species fragility in Kent, Folkestone Fringe 2020. The Unseeables: a tale of extinction in three birds, film for Scarborough Museum 2020. Myco-Lective an artist collective development programme, with Ama Josephine Budge, Chisenhale Studios 2020. Looking at Bees (film) and Garden to Garden (participation project) with Invisible Dust and South Cliff Gardens, Scarborough 2020. Eyecatchers, National Trust Dunham Massey 2020-21. Ask Somerset’s Plants, radio broadcasts for BBC Somerset and podcasts for Somerset Art Weeks Festival 2019, with Marcus Coates. Phytocentric, performance at LUX London, 2019. Mycorrhizal Meditation, participatory sound work, presented as a digital installation at Taipei Biennale, Governors Island, NYC, Bánkitó Fesztivál, Hungary, Radical Mycology Conference USA, Furtherfield Gallery London, and as live performance at The Bluecoat and UNESCO Paris, 2017-19. Plant Hunting, Invisible Dust for Whitby, 2018. Ask the Wild with Marcus Coates, at Whitechapel Gallery, Tate St Ives, Turner Contemporary, Whitstable Biennale and the Ash Project, and the South London Botanical Institute 2017-18.
WITH INVITED GUESTS ANNE DUFFAU (RCA/ transmissions), GAVIN EVERALL (bookworks), GHISLAINE LEUNG (artist), SARAH MCCROCRY (CCA Goldsmiths)
As pandemic-related protocols of in- and exclusion have enacted a relative demise of physical space and co-production, the exponential increase in online mediation has substantially transformed the ways in which cultural, cognitive and affective content is shared, disseminated and/or produced.
Modes of distribution are immediately affected by these changes and provide one of its main axes of acceleration. We treat this doubling as a starting point for an engagement with distribution that attends to its logistics as well as its performative affordances: Operations of distribution organise dissemination and dispersal, as well as access and participation, and are necessarily entangled with the infrastructural patterns and behaviours that orient these.
We believe that examining distribution in, through and under the terms of the pandemic from February 2020 to now allows us to critically assess at least some of the large-scale re-orientations of the cultural field that have taken shape over the last fifteen months. Drawing on institutional practices and experiences in cultural and artistic work, the event will chart how modes of distribution have adapted to and in turn modified pandemic-induced and –accelerated habits and capacities.
MODES OF DISTRIBUTION 1: DISTRIBUTION AND CRISIS is primarily drawing on experiences and models from the expanded art world but we welcome participants from across disciplines, regardless of how they habitually describe their (research) practice. The event will consist of presentations and in-conversations with our invited guest contributors, as well as open plenary sessions. All disciplines welcome.
The event is part of a broader project on notions, formats and practices of distribution and/as production, and aims to explore how modalities of distribution have registered the ongoing pandemic. The event is part of the ongoing ‘FUTURE OF ART RESEARCH’ series organised by the Art Research Programme at Goldsmiths, University of London, and generously supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.