Hear hear 🎤 🐍

The CreaTures are excited to partner with the Uroboros Festival 2021 and organise a festival track on Feral Creative Practices 🐝🦠🌲.

Feral: experimental, more-than-human, foraged & rummaged, regenerative, edible & compostable, un-following recipes, down-to-earth, slimy, rural & miscellaneous, forgotten, made invisible, stray but not lost, wilfully wild.

The Feral Creative Practices track proposes embodied, sensory-rich design and art experiments at the scale of our bodies as a starting point for co-creative inquiry into large-scale social and ecological issues. Leveraging everyday materials like soil, compost, edibles and microbial cultures, these craft-full more-than-human experiments can be both mundane and surprising; grounding and exhilarating. All of them involve our bodies as familiar ‘places’ from where processes of thinking, imagining, reflection and action commonly unfold.

Grounded in embodied and situated ideation, these experiments can serve as a relatable entry point for co-creative explorations of larger societal issues that are hard to grasp. The Feral track is committed to a speculative, open-ended mode of exchange, and does not aspire to provoke immediate solutions to any of these issues. Rather, it seeks to help unfold new social imaginaries and ‘arouse an appetite for what might be possible’ (Haraway, 2011), as the first humble step in supporting transformative change towards futures in which all creatures can flourish.

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The Feral track will present three experimental projects: the Cyano Automaton by Agnieszka Pokrywka; the Nocturne by Isabel Beavers and the CreaTures Glossary by Amira Hanafi. Collateral events, including the workshop on Feral Ways of Knowing and Transformation, the More-Than-Human Dérive experiment by Kate Geck, Jaz Choi, Siobhan McCarthy, and Ana Tiquia, and the Feral discussion panel are currently in the making.

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The Uroboros festival is a hybrid experimental inquiry into the transformative potential of design research and practice. The festival’s main theme Designing in Troubling Times is inspired by the ambiguous symbol of Uroboros – a serpent devouring itself and changing its form in an eternal cycle of re-creation, using its own body as fuel. The circular and cyclical Uroboros captures the ambiguity of present technologies and designs for the troubling and troubled times that we are living in. The serpent represents the mythological origins of all our technological promises about eternal returns and the search for utopia. Asking what design can do to support positive change, the festival explores the cyclical processes of design imagination, innovation, failure and return.

Have a look at the Uroboros festival open call for works 👈

The open call proposals should be submitted no later than March 21st 2021, 11pm CET by sending an email to opencall@uroboros.design.

CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.