Curated by Gaja Mežnarić Osole and Danica Sretenović.
Originally produced for Future DiverCities partners and their local coalitions to empower eco-social engagement with neglected cityscapes.
The School of Feral Grounds situates cultural practices in the world in which capital-driven economies act as geological forces, terraforming the earth into a place where climate change, social inequality, and species extinction call for urgent collective action. The school acts as a forum for interchange, where reflections, concepts, case studies, and generative exercises invite participants to position urban ecologies within the field of culture by interlinking common notions of the urban and ecology. To engage with the feral grounds of 21st century cities we take a close look at the practices between the development of neoliberal cities and nature’s capacity to reclaim their cracks.
Situated in the experience of running the production laboratory Krater and the Feral Palace urgent pedagogy, the school nurtures a collaborative learning environment for thinking and engaging with untamed urban sites. To support their eco-social regeneration, it works to enhance cultural workers’ capacities in regenerative place-making and place-keeping, artistic curation, programming, and advocacy. It consists of three study modules (SM) developed and run by architect and theoretician Danica Sretenović and eco-social designer Gaja Mežnarić Osole together with inspiring guest speakers working in visual arts, curation, activism, geography, and ecology.
