Feral 2023: 10 days of School of Nomadic Urbanism and 2 days of international encounters on the role of art in the urban fabric, for a sensitive city.
Somewhere between cracking asphalt and plankton, Feral consists in 10 days of sensitive sharing, experimentation and reflection with the aim of leaving behind the measured, framed city and rethinking public space as shared. This year's programme begins with an invitation to Stalker, an Italian collective of artists/activists/walkers, to set up its School of Nomadic Urbanism in Brussels. When looking for a base for this school, the Marais Wiels (the Wiels marsh) was the obvious choice. In fact, Stalker is involved in a twin project in Rome, Italy, dedicated to the defence of the Lago Bullicante, a lake "reclaiming its rights".
The Marais Wiels is a very feral place, as we love them, but also a topical area for local struggle and the social and sensitive creation of the city.
It is from this sensitivity that we are drawing the thread. What role can sensitivity play in the urban fabric? How can artists be involved in the making of the city? What are the dynamics and strategies deployed by artists, curators, activists and elected representatives to achieve this?
Using the Marais Wiels as a case study, we'll look at the development of new urban imaginaries. Who has a say? What is the state of interaction between politicians and citizens? What role does art play in all this? Can art open up new ways to build a sensitive city?
This enquiry will be a collective one. We will form an assembly. We will unearth memories, with flair and joy.
Feral will take place during Stalker's School of Nomadic Urbanism, as a two day of event combining talks, workshops and artistic interventions. Feral will begin at the open air swimming pool FLOW -an artificial body of water filtered by plants- and continue at the Marais Wiels, where we will form an open air assembly, under a tent. The whole programme will end on 17th September with a collective action involving participants from the School of Nomadic Urbanism and the assembly formed during Feral, a Rite of Alliance for the insurgent lakes of Europe, open to all.
With Stalker (Giulia Fiocca & Lorenzo Romito) (IT), Tom & Nicolas Valckenaere (BE), Lieven de Cauter (BE), Charlotte Cosson (FR), Rebecca Davies & Anna Francis (UK), Cuesta (FR), Agathe Voisin & Clément Thiry (BE), Joon-Lynn Goh (MY/UK), les Fé·e·s du Marais (BE), Anna Czapski (BE), Laurent Petit/Agence Nationale de Psychanalyse Urbaine (FR), Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie (Sabrina Baldacci & Enzo de Martino) (IT), Allan Wei & Valeria Cirillo (BE/IT), Paula Almiron & Wouter De Raeve (AR/BE), Maria Lucia Cruz Correia (BE/PT), Back2SoilBasics (BE), Jeanne Pruvot Simonneaux (BE), Rafaella Houlstan-Hasaerts & Giulietta Laki (BE).
Registrations are now closed. Try your luck and come to the festival's reception!
Saturday 9th September
18.00: Opening lecture (EN)
What contribution can the arts make to the creation of a social conscience? How can new practices help nature to reclaim its rights on a planet destroyed by human exploitation? Stalker is working on this in Rome.
Their presentation will take the form of an Assembly, open to the public, invited to share its stories of local environmental struggles, its ideas and knowledge of the Brussels environment. This Assembly will be a way of presenting the Nomadic School of Urbanism and beginning the development of Circumstance #8: from the Alliance to the Federation- Alliance ritual between insurgent lakes: Lago Bullicante (Rome) and Marais Wiels (Brussels), which will take place on Sunday 17th September.
A proposal by Stalker (IT) (Giulia Fiocca, Lorenzo Romito).
Free access, open to all
@ La Bellone
Sunday 10th September
11.00-17.00: Exploratory walk to Marais Wiels
Free access, open to all
RV @ La Bellone
Bring your pic-nic and some water
Monday 11th September
19:00 (EN)
Encounter with Lieven de Cauter and his book Ending the Anthropocene: Essays on Activism in the Age of Collapse
@ Librairie Par Chemins
In this book, Lieven de Cauter investigates the idea that if we want to avoid collapse, we have to end the Anthropocene – the geological era of the gigantic, devastating impact of our species on planet Earth. It might even be, he argues, that the collapse of our current, growth-maximizing system is the only hope for the biosphere.
Wednesday 13th September
19:00 (FR)
Encounter with Charlotte Cosson and her book Férale
@ Librairie Par Chemins
Can art give us a better view of the life that teems in our daily lives? To build a bridge between art and ecology, Charlotte Cosson set out in search of works of art that are turned towards the earth and the wild world: hens that are works of art, mushrooms that form temples, paintings that save forests, a collective that dances for plants... "Férale" presents an art that composes with flora and fauna and uproots the mechanisms of "masters and dominators" to replace them with gestures of humility towards those without whom breathing would be impossible. Conceived from a place dedicated to permaculture, this essay responds to concrete issues with works that stem from this new sensibility of love for the living.
Friday 15th and Saturday 16th September
Feral-International talks (On registration only, limited places) (FR/EN)
>15th sept: Art as an agent of urban change
With Rebecca Davies & Anna Francis (UK), Cuesta (FR), Agathe Voisin & Clément Thiry (BE), Joon-Lynn Goh (MY/UK), les Fé·e·s du Marais (BE), Anna Czapski (BE), Laurent Petit/Agence Nationale de Psychanalyse Urbaine (FR)
>16th sept: The marsh as a catalyst for art and a new common imaginary
With Stalker (Giulia Fiocca & Lorenzo Romito), Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie (Sabrina Baldacci & Enzo de Martino) (IT), Paula Almiron & Wouter De Raeve (AR/BE), Maria Lucia Cruz Correira (BE/PT), Allan Wei & Valeria Cirillo (BE/IT), Back2SoilBasics (BE), Jeanne Pruvot Simonneaux & Anna Czapski (BE)
Sunday 17th September
11.00-14.00: Collective Action
Circumstance #8: from the Alliance to the Federation- Alliance ritual between insurgent lakes: Lago Bullicante (Rome) and Marais Wiels (Brussels)
Celebrating the first anniversary of the Alliance between ASBL Marais Wiels Moeras (BE) and the Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie (IT)
Free access, open to all
@ Marais Wiels
Art as an agent of urban change
____
Morning
9:30 at FLOW
With Rebecca Davies & Anna Francis (UK), Cuesta (FR), Agathe Voisin & Clément Thiry (BE), Joon-Lynn Goh (MY/UK)
Afternoon
14:00 at the Marais Wiels
With Les Fé·e·s du Marais (BE), a collective workshop by Cuesta (FR) & Anna Czapski (BE), a game/performance by Rebecca Davies & Anna Francis (UK)
19:00 at the Marais Wiels
Performance by Laurent Petit/ANPU (Agence Nationale de Psychanalyse Urbaine) (FR)
____
Rebecca Davies & Anna Francis (UK)
The Portland Inn Project
(EN)
Artists Rebecca Davies and Anna Francis created The Portland Inn Project CIC in 2016 in a residential area of Stoke-on-Trent. In collaboration with other artists, organisations and residents, a pub was renovated and a whole new local dynamic was set into motion. They say, "We believe in the power of art: as a tool to communicate our history, represent the needs of local people and create a space for communities to come together and learn."
This project, that they will present during Feral, advocates for people-led change, and champions the importance of art in driving that change, and in cooperation with public services.
Rebecca Davies is from London and lives in Stoke-on-Trent. She has a deeply embedded and collaborative practice that crosses illustration, design, performance and event. Her work explores the role of art in making change, as a device and platform, to represent and communicate complex stories and politics.
Anna Francis is an artist and researcher whose work aims to create space to discuss and reframe city resources, through participatory art interventions. She creates situations for herself, the public and other artists to explore places differently. In recent years the interventions which Anna has worked on focus on the city of Stoke-on-Trent, and use an action research process to recognise untapped resources, plan responses to disused sites in the city, take action to change the way these sites are viewed, and potentially, make changes, which can be temporary and sometimes permanent. Through this, Anna aims to gain an understanding of the role of artists, arts organisations and communities in the development of places.
https://www.theportlandinnproject.com/
Cuesta (FR)
The practice of cultural urbanism
(FR)
Alexandra and Agathe are founding members and associate directors of Cuesta cooperative. For the past 8 years, they have been developing an original form of expertise, working in a network with a number of French artists and cultural operators, which they have called "cultural urbanism". Cultural urbanism combines the different practices that contribute to development projects that aim to make territories more inhabitable for humans and non-humans alike. Cultural urbanism consists of implementing site-based artistic and cultural interventions that create the conditions for residents and users to be able to act. This interdisciplinary field is rooted in both the contemporary challenges of transition and the conjunction of several histories: that of urban planning, of art history, of cultural policies, and of popular education. This approach finds its place and its meaning at many points in the making of territories: urban scenography, uses, atmospheres, social relations, symbolic production.
They will be presenting examples and tools developed in the course of their projects, in particular those relating to ecological and social issues that echo the problems encountered at the Marais du Wiels.
For 10 years, within the Arter agency, Alexandra Cohen set up numerous exhibitions and artistic events in public space. After following SPEAP in 2013/2014 (an experimental arts and politics programme at Sciences-Po), she returned to the approach of social sciences and to believing in the role of artists in society and the making of public policy. She is co-founder and associate director of Cuesta since 2015.
Agathe has been working for over twenty years on the relationship between art, culture, public space and urban planning. Before co-founding and Cuesta in 2015, she participated in the emergence of Dédale, an association working on hybridising art, technologies and territories. She then joined the production agency Arter, where she coordinated major artistic programmes in public spaces, both permanent and event-based, and set up an arts/landscaping consultancy unit. This experience made her want to rethink the place of art in the field of social and urban planning. This is now what she is doing at Cuesta, of which she is co-founder and associate director.
https://cuesta.fr/fr
Agathe Voisin & Clément Thiry (BE)
Présences d'usages (Presences of use)
(FR)
For Agathe Voisin & Clément Thiry, the adventure is above all urban. They spend hours wandering the city, observing how it organises itself, abandons itself, transforms and renews itself. This enables them to understand the energies that inhabit it and to feel the vibrations that shape it. Their perception is sharpened by listening to its noises, day and night, its silences, its cries for life, the melodies of the trucks and the screeching of the concrete. Around the Pierre Marchant Bridge, Agathe and Clément have remained attentive to the undefined, shapeable spaces and the way in which they are inhabited by presences and spirits. They invite you to immerse yourself in these spaces, and to reflect collectively on the ways in which residents sometimes make them their own. Spontaneous developments flourish, vegetables grow and the city takes on new forms that defy the norm.
Agathe Voisin is an architect, urban planner and visual artist. She wanders the city, shaping it with its inhabitants. Her preferred medium is public space. In the past, she has focused on children, working with them to design the houses of their dreams and mogul courses. For the past year, she has been devoting herself to collective experimentation and research into the autonomous and spontaneous ways in which the city is made. She is involved in a number of public art collectives and activist groups working to preserve the city's last remaining wastelands and increase the amount of space available to residents.
Clément Thiry sings, draws and makes installations while taking night-time walks to collect the under-lit spaces of the city. Then he builds nests in which he experiments with sleep to rethink our daily lives. He moves from the role of precarious architect to that of sleeper. He builds by weaving and mixing organic and industrial materials. He uses what he finds on his wanderings. Walking is an integral part of his practice. His fragile constructions are created by adding, imprinting and knotting. What doesn't hold together is consolidated rather than remade. He is also a member of the object theatre collective Boîte à clous and the children's punk band Gyrophare.
https://index.nadine.be/sunset-autoroute/
Joon-Lyn Goh (MY/UK)
Imagining cities that embrace our agency to move or stay
(EN)
Social movements hold collective desires for the cities we call home. In organising for border abolition, the right to remain or sanctuary, we are imagining how cities can embrace our agency to move or stay. How can we nurture and resource social movement imagination and experimentation as part of city-making? Joon-Lynn will introduce the work and ongoing inquiry of Migrants in Culture, a migrant-led design agency based in London, and share learnings from Saturday School, a practice space for migrant organisers to embody, imagine and design for border abolition.
Joon-Lynn Goh is a cultural organiser, working with art and infrastructure. She embraces organising as a practice in which migrant and global majority communities are protagonists of change, and where infrastructure, organisation and business are creative experiments in stewardship and worldbuilding. Joon-Lynn is a co-Founding Director of migrant-led design agency Migrants in Culture; Co-Founding Director of cancer-patient led business Sex With Cancer, and Civic Futures Fellow 2021-22 for the Greater London Authority. She declined a 2019 MBE (Member of the British Empire Award) for Services to Equality for organising a Syrian refugee resettlement programme with Bristol City Council and Citizens UK (2014-2017).
https://www.joonlynngoh.net/
Les Fé·e·s du Marais (BE)
Le Marais Wiels, le Jardin des Fé·e·s (The Marais Wiels, the Fairy Garden)
(FR)
A long time ago, water gushed out of the soil. Well hidden in the hard concrete of the city, a wild Marsh came (back) to life.
Among the flora and fauna of this strange industrial site, two fairies suddenly began to twirl: Fé·e Nyx and Fi Fé·e. They were soon joined by Fé·e Do. Curiosity had got the better of them...
Regardless of the property developers' plans for destruction, more and more little winged creatures appeared in this magical, enchanted place. Their aim: to care for the Marsh and its rich biodiversity, and with it, to resist our demise. Instead of fighting, the fairies chose to act. Observing, studying, learning, experimenting, playing, creating, dreaming... everything is possible in the Fairy Garden! If they can't save the Marsh, the Marsh will save them.
The Fé·e·s will start the afternoon by introducing the Marais, so that we can understand a little better what territory we're stepping into.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/maraiswiels/?locale=fr_FR
Collective workshop with Cuesta (FR) & Anna Czapski (BE)
Why do we like the fringes?
Group investigation on the links between democracy, the sensitive city and indeterminate spaces
(FR)
Cuesta and the Cifas invite you to take turns in wearing the hat of expertise, to share and connect our experiences in relation to the festival's theme.
Divided into small groups, audience and presenters, will survey the site, hunting for signals and unearthing memories. Memories that have been kept within us, because they carry knowledge that must be shared, and signals that have come all the way from the future to deliver a message.
We'll be looking at a range of subjects, reflecting on the morning's presentations, with the aim of investigating the uses of the city that defy the norm.
Sensoriality, materiality and imagination, for a sensitive city.
Information that feeds our collective capacity to take action or to stay put.
A precious time to meet and to listen to each other, a time to connect with the site and delve into the subject of the festival on a personal level.
Performance / game by Rebecca Davies and Anna Francis (UK)
YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY!
(EN)
A new visioning game show navigating and deconstructing structures and decision making processes. How do we as artists and citizens avoid climbing into the trojan horse for a place at the table and represent ourselves in decisions that affect our lives?
Presented by the social media famous Hayley and Bill, it's a pub quiz meets monopoly style event. YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY! is an afternoon of frivolity and fiscal dynamism where the aim of the game is for you and your team to create a vision for and spend a cut of a fictional arts and civic budget for your respective communities. Public sculpture or Community Garden? Fireworks display or Kate Bush for a day? THE MONEY IS YOURS (terms and conditions apply, you didn't think this was going to be EASY did you?!!)
Performance by Laurent Petit/ANPU (FR)
The Marais Wiels on the couch
(FR)
Show duration: about 50 mins
Urban psychoanalyst: Laurent Petit
Liaison representatives ANPU: Fabienne Quéméneur & Estelle Vilcot
Founded in 2008, the ANPU (Agence Nationale de Psychanalyse Urbaine - National Agency for Urban Psychoanalysis) has been entrusted with the delicate task of psychoanalysing the whole world. A living symbol of Nature's unconscious desire to reclaim its place in the city, the Marais Wiels poses a twofold question: how are we going to reconcile ourselves with the non-human while housing humans? Are we going to have to rediscover common sense, a sense of the commons or a sense of the uncommon? Should we speed up the process of rewilding? But what about mosquitoes and bacteria? Won't the badgers have the last word, yet again? We'll be attempting to answer all these questions at a conference labeled "No electricity".
After a brief career as an engineer, Laurent Petit threw himself into the wonderful world of show business, starting out as a juggler and supermarket clown. His encounter with Eric Heilmann and his work on the links between Mickey the mouse and Michelangelo enabled him to lay the foundations for a new genre, the para-scientific show, a genre in which the real and the fake are so well mixed that audiences end up losing their sense of reality. As part of ANPU, the Agence Nationale de Psychanalyse Urbaine (National Agency for Urban Psychoanalysis) (2008-2058), he has psychoanalysed over a hundred territories as part of the ambitious project to urban psychoanalysis the whole world, project that will be presented this year in the show World Analysis.
L'or en petit is also the author of La ville sur le Divan published by Éditions le Contre-Allée (published in 2013), Happy End published by Éditions Wildproject (2021) and À la Soupe! Les 20 ans du festival, Éditions Invenit (2022).
https://www.anpu.fr/
Image by Rebecca Davies & Anna Francis
The Marsh for a resilient city. The Marsh as a catalyst for art and a new common imaginary
____
Day at the Marais Wiels
Morning 9:30>13:00
With Stalker (Giulia Fiocca & Lorenzo Romito) (IT), Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie: le lac Bullicante de Roma (Sabrina Baldacci & Enzo de Martino) (IT), Allan Wei & Valeria Cirillo (BE/IT), Paula Almiron & Wouter De Raeve (AR/BE), Maria Lucia Cruz Correia (PT/BE)
Afternoon 14:00> 17:30
4 workshops to choose from:
#1 Allan Wei & Valeria Cirillo (BE/IT)
Thinking with wetlands, imagining a desirable futures
#2 Paula Almiron & Wouter de Raeve (AR/BE)
Swamp Sacrifices
#3 Back2SoilBasics (BE)
#4 Jeanne Pruvot Simonneaux & Anna Czapski (BE)
We will come back. Preparation to the Haunt-ology of places
____
Stalker (Giulia Fiocca & Lorenzo Romito)-DAFNE (Danni Ambientali ed Ecossitemi Urbani Emergenti- Environmental damage and new urban ecosystems)
&Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie (IT): le lac Bullicante de Roma (Sabrina Baldacci & Enzo de Martino)
For a Federation of insurgent lakes in Europe
(EN)
Midway through their School of Nomadic Urbanism, Giulia Fiocca & Lorenzo Romito will come under the tent and present the DAFNE project. They will be accompanied by Sabrina Baldacci & Enzo de Martino from the Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie association, fighting for the defense of Lake Bullicante.
Lake Bullicante emerged in Rome in 1992, on the ruins of a closed artificial silk factory, during the construction of a shopping centre. Lago Bullicante is a place of great biodiversity, its spontaneous renaturation was met by a community that has, over the years, learned to defend it, to know it, and to care for it.
Just like the Marais Wiels, the lake emerged amid industrial infrastructures and is reshaping the urban landscape while providing neighbourhoods marked by environmental and social inequalities with the biodiversity now necessary to make cities liveable. The speakers will highlight the links between the Marais Wiels and Lake Bullicante, and will explain the importance of building a federation insurgent lakes in Europe.
https://stalkerlab.wixsite.com/spontaneamente
https://www.facebook.com/StalkerNoworking/
https://www.instagram.com/stalkerlab/?hl=fr
Allan Wei & Valeria Cirillo (BE/IT)
Thinking with wetlands
(FR)
A doctoral student in philosophy in Rome, Valeria Cirillo took interest in the fight for Lago Bullicante as part of a 'spontaneous' collective research project with Stalker. Her research examines the ways in which we inhabit ecopolitical catastrophe from the perspectives of Alfred North Whitehead's thinking. The lake becomes a case study for rethinking philosophical production when faced with ecological emergencies.
A historian with a background in law, geography and education, Allan Wei has been living and teaching in Forest for ten years. He is also involved in the project of the Par Chemins bookshop. Having witnessed the growing interest in a new local pond threatened by land speculation in a context of densification and gentrification, he started carrying out prospective research on the future of Brussels' urban wastelands. He also works for the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Paula Almiron & Wouter de Raeve (AR/BE)
I Build My Language With Rocks
(EN)
Since 2021, Paula Almiron and Wouter de Raeve have been working on the project I Build My Language with Rocks, a choreographic project about the movements of the Northern Quarter in Brussels. Within this research, the swamp has been a companion as a way to experiment on alternative ways of creating space in a neighborhood that is currently being redeveloped. As part of their research, they are now working on a program that is called Swamp Sacrifices. It addresses the swamp and the water of the Zenne valley that is buried under the asfalt, concrete and buildings of Brussels. The swamp has been historically a place of non-productivity and as such an ecology for transcendence and spirituality. In Brussels, as in many other parts of Northern Europe, the swamp has been a place of sacrification, where people addressed offerings to gods, superior beings and other worlds. But throughout the evolution of the city the swamp has been forced to become a zone of productivity, inscribed in a capitalist thinking that regards both nature and human as a commodity.
The duo will share part of their working process. They will also give a workshop in the afternoon.
Paula Almiron is an argentinian choreographer and dancer, living and working in Brussels. Her work navigates between geology, choreography and fiction, and it is focused since some years in the material, social and spiritual transformation of water landscapes. Since 2019, she's been working on a series of works that grow in relation to a desertifying group of bodies of water located in the Bolivian Andean plateau. (Always Coming Hole, 2021, The River and The Devil, 2024). Since 2021, she collaborates with Wouter De Raeve in the project I Build My Language With Rocks, a choreographic project about the movements of the Northern Quarter in Brussels, where among other things, they coordinate the space M33.
Wouter De Raeve, artist and landscape designer, develops a critical as well as speculative reflection on the role of the creative actor (the architect, the artist, etc) within the power dynamics of the involved parties in spatial development processes. Recently, he developed the film project WTC A Love Story in collaboration with Lietje Bauwens in which the relationship between the actors involved in the reconversion of the WTC towers and the North Quarter in Brussels is analysed. They are currently working on the sequel WTC A Never-Ending Love Story. Their collaboration takes shape through the non-profit organisation Fourthirty-One.
https://www.paula-almiron.com/
https://hiros.be/fr/artistes/paula-almiron-wouter-de-raeve-2/
Maria Lucia Cruz Correia (PT/BE)
Natural Contract Lab
(EN)
Correia’s cross-sectoral and hybrid practice speaks to her deep engagement with the ecological crises as a guardian of nature. Since 2009, her work reacts to the climate emergency and environmental conflicts of our times by bringing audiences and communities into participatory laboratories. These temporary collaborative processes are like a living organism that grow in kinship with ecologists, rivers, activists, resilient plants, environmental lawyers, restorative justice practitioners... Correia’s visual installations, action performances and participatory laboratories express a sense of geo-politics, environmental advocacy and kinship with the more-than-human-world. Her artistic practice weaves rituals of care, embodied performance, walking-with practice and social design to fabulate environmental social services, such as “Urban Action Clinic”, “Common Dreams School”, “voiceofnatureKINSTITUTE” and “Natural Contract lab”. These proposals are attempts to engage communities with tools from rights of nature, restorative justice, environmental grief, regenerative activism, climate survival and reciprocal care for critical landscapes.
http://mluciacruzcorreia.com/
4 workshops to choose from:
#1 Allan Wei & Valeria Cirillo (BE/IT)
Thinking with wetlands, imagining a desirable futures
(FR)
Allan and Valeria are proposing a two-part workshop that will relate to the collective questions raised during the Nomadic School of Urbanism proposed Stalker. In the first part of the workshop, participants will be invited to speculate together on what the practice of 'Thinking with wetlands' might entail, based on a collective reading of text extracts. This will be followed by a fiction-lab session in which participants will be invited to imagine desirable futures for and with resurgent urban wetlands.
#2 Paula Almiron & Wouter de Raeve (AR/BE)
Swamp Sacrifices
(EN)
Swamp Sacrifices is an attempt at approaching the Marsh as a sacrificial place, as a space of non-productivity and as a zone where the affective quality of the sacred can emerge. Paula and Wouter will share their working process for the creation of such a programme and put elements of it to the test, collectively.
#3 Back2SoilBasics (BE)
Fire policies
(EN/FR)
Back2SoilBasics will host a fake harvest where vegetables will be "picked" from the Marais. The group will then make and eat soupe using the harvested produce. This will be a pretext to discuss the accessibility to good food while manifesting abundance whist hot soupe cooks on the fire.
Back2SoilBasics is a network of people guided by the power of Mother Nature. They share basic tools for permaculture in an urban context to make resilience more accessible. They focus on people of colour, local communities or people with less access to nature. This creates an open school, a space for exchange where everyone's contributions has equal value.
#4 Jeanne Pruvot Simonneaux & Anna Czapski (BE)
We will come back. Preparation to the Haunt-ology of places
(FR)
We will start with a languid physical and sensory warm-up to put us in a slightly altered state of perception and in deep connection with the Marsh. We will then travel through space and time using tried and tested techniques. When we arrive in this other place, we will take the opportunity to change our personalities and quickly create a parallel micro-society. We will then think about which ghost we want to be and which places we want to haunt.
Finally, we will return to the here and now, with all our arms and legs.
This other self, encountered during the experience, may reappear from time to time, in order to alter everyday life.
A narrative speculation technique based mainly on the sense of smell, intuition and inner vision.
Anna Czapski is a documentary punk poet. After founding and directing cultural projects with a penchant for utopia and chaos, Anna now uses gentle diversion of methods (collective intelligence, futurology) to create slightly mischievous situations and approach other ways of living, between teamwork and group poetry. She loves working in public space, in the open air and always in a group. She loves the clash of cultures, the sharing of power and the friction between fiction and reality. Her main current projects are Futurology of Cooperation and La Plage Interdite: la marche comme lecture/écriture du paysage (with Marine Fontaine). She is a member of Wander Structure.
Jeanne Pruvot Simonneaux is a sculptor and a cook. Her work is a vivid mix of sensations, culinary hearing, non-anthropocentric touch, 360-degree view, dynamic and fragrant movement, and sharp taste. She intercepts the global, for play and performance. With Antoine Boute, she forms the Lasso intervention duo (a barefoot start-up specialising in radical & playful austerity: tactile tactics for anywhere, anytime and miraculously fun body exits).
Jeanne and Anna both sing in experimental rock bands.
Image by Paula Almiron & Wouter De Raeve
Circumstance #8: from the Alliance to the Federation- Alliance ritual between insurgent lakes: Lago Bullicante (Rome) and Marais Wiels (Brussels)
11.00-14.00
@Marais Wiels
Collective Action celebrating the first anniversary of the Alliance between ASBL Marais Wiels Moeras (BE) and the Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie (IT).
This Collective Action will be prepared during the School of Nomadic Urbanism. It will gather the members of the School as well as Feral's assembly, and more.
Free access and open to all!
Image by Stalker
Installations by Tom & Nicolas Valckenaere (BE)
Mutiny from stern to bow
Tom & Nicolas Valckenaere seek out hybrid territories, mainly urban environments where nature had re-emerged. Their approach could be descrived as 'passionate amateurism', they are driven by the marvellous things that appear in what we call 'natural' environments. They immerse themselves in these environments, wandering through them, looking for intrigue. Through misappropriation, micro-biological research, observation and humour, Tom & Nicolas invent objects that shake up our conception of public space and redefine the way we live in it.
During Feral, they will be sharing prototypes of various objects created in the context of the Marais Wiels: subaquatic species tablecloths, aquariums for zooplankton and briophytes in the shape of Wiel's Brewery beer glasses, modular public furniture... These objects are inspired by and pay tribute to the Marais and its history. During Feral, we'll be using them and perhaps helping to transform them.
Tom & Nicolas Valckenaere are visual artists who live and work in Brussels. They are both graduates of the erg in "Art practice and critical tools". Tom is also an amateur painter and ornithologist. Nicolas is in charge of artistic production at "Arts et publiques", where he designs joint art projects. They both recently produced the exhibition "L'Invisible Milieu" at Juan d'Oultremont.
Image by Tom & Nicolas Valckenaere
This year, Feral will take place during the School of Nomadic Urbanism, conducted by the italian collective Stalker.
They invite you to delve into the artistic, scientific, and eco-activist issues at stake at the Marais Wiels and its Italian twin, Lago Bullicante in Rome.
The School of Nomadic Urbanism is a co-learning pathway to learn about social creativity and collective action, exploration and experimentation. It invites its participants to presence, respect, listening to places and the people living in them, conviviality and creative interactions with the far-away, the unexpected, the excluded, the strange(r). The School of Nomadic Urbanism will be travelling, convivial and playful, in the open-air and open to all.
For more information.
Image by Stalker
