Feral is a highlight of Cifas’ programme. It is a festival that reflects on today’s urgent political and social issues, and how artists take them into their hands. It is a programme of artistic interventions and encounters that uses art to influence everyday life in Brussels. Feral can take place on a boat, at the abattoirs, in a shop or at a carnival. Feral is urban, interstitial, peripheral and feral.

Feral is all about performing art in the city and in its fringes, is questions the commons and their rough edges, urbanity, rurality, the landscape and intimacy.

This year, Feral festival will take place on 12-13-14 September at La Fonderie in Molenbeek.

Editorial

Today, so many artists have recourse to rituals in their practice. Whether they are rituals of care, healing or passage, or rituals for transformation, struggle and alliances (one thinks, of course, of the insurgent lakes), they all have in common that they offer the audience other pacts of connection and participation, where stage performances may mark their limits.

What do rituals do to art? ↔  What does art do to rituals?

Why do we need formats that bring us together in new and different ways? What does this say about our society? Its fears? About its mobilisation?

We invite you to wander through this journey together with a fine-tuned and witty combination of artists, activists, researchers. Together, we will be sharing stories, analyses and experiences.

We will follow a timeline that doesn’t separate us,

We will try to understand the links between secularisation, colonialism and the crisis of sensibility,

We will celebrate the earth,

We will question the transition from the intimate to the public sphere,

We will ask ourselves who has the right to change traditions and folklore,

We will find tools for action and social justice,

We will imagine new ways of welcoming newcomers,

We will call magic,

We may not always agree,

We will unbewitch ourselves,

We will set up a fire,

We will eat soft bread sandwiches,

We will play the flute.

And if we had to invent an artistic ritual for the city, what would it be?

Registrations

Registrations are not open yet, they will open on the week of the 12 August 2024.