Feral Ways of Knowing and Doing: Tools and Resources for Transformational Creative Practice

Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards sustainability transformations. With this in mind: What are the possibilities and limits of the tools and resources that contemporary creative practices are using to reconceive and redesign forms of interaction between different disciplines, audiences and cultures for sustainability transformations? This contribution presents preliminary findings from a transdisciplinary workshop where the participants were invited to share their experiences of designing or using “tools and resources for feral ways of knowing and transformation” within creative practice. While the concept of ‘feral’ remained open to a wide range of different interpretations, participants used the term in three main ways: to foreground embodied, situated, bottom-up, ways of working with organic material and more-than-human issues that require relinquishing control; to refer to reappropriating existing tools and processes in ways and for purposes different to the original intentions, and; to accept and enable thoughts, feelings, and actions to develop in their own ways, beyond the creative practitioner’s control.