Call for Chapter Proposals: Going Feral: A Proposition for a Speculative Animism in the Arts

Vernon Press invites book chapter proposals to be included in a forthcoming scholarly volume on the critical analysis of animism in the arts with a focus on the boundary practices of going feral. Edited by Paula Chambers and Dawn Woolley.

For The Milk of Dreams (Venice Biennale 2022), curator Cecilia Alemani posed a series of questions about the nature of humanity and ensuing future responsibilities, asking ‘what would life look like without us?’ For the British Art Show 9 2021/22, Anne Hardy exhibited her installation Liquid Landscape (2018), in which crushed drink cans and nitrous oxide cannisters appeared scattered across the floor. These seemingly valueless objects had been cast in concrete and aluminium, their matte grey patina often appearing indistinguishable from their originals. Persistence (a Venice Biennale collateral event) showed Louise Nevelson’s large-scale sculptures made from multiple wooden offcuts. These leftover scraps and broken domestic objects, sourced from skips and bins, become monumentalised through the processes of sculptural making.

If the feral is that which was once domesticated but has now returned to the wild, then feral objects are the stuff that loiters in forgotten urban spaces, on paths and in alleyways. Nomadic objects are blown against fences, they gather and disperse in abandoned parks and derelict playgrounds. Going feral disrupts the life cycle of consumerism, questioning notions of value: producing the ugly, the kitsch, the mass produced, the things that don’t quite fit anywhere. Animism as an ontology can be used to frame contemporary issues such as environmentalism, waste and discard studies, and speculate ways of decentring anthropomorphism.

Going feral is a provocative call to untame, queer, and radicalize feminist thought and practice, producing the more-than-human, multispecies entanglements, and processes of dynamic resistance. This volume is interested in critical analyses of the process of going feral in artworks and art practices. We are asking, what are potential futures materialised through artworks that reimage the present as a world populated by things, a place where the sensibility of materials becomes carriers of agency?

Chapters may focus on a particular artwork, body of work, or focus on creative approaches to the notions and functions of going feral.

Areas of inquiry can include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Feral artworks and feminist new materialism
• Feral art practices, critical race and queer theories
• Objects, performance and nomadic strategies
• Going feral in art history
• Collaboration, participation and the potential of going feral in social art practices
• Animism as a decolonialising practice
• Going feral as a strategy of embodied resistance
• Feralism as an anti-capitalistic approach to new media
• Feral interventions into markets and economies

If you are interested in contributing to the edited volume, please submit your chapter proposal (around 300 words) and biography (no more than 100 words) to the editors Paula Chambers (paula.chambers@leeds-art.ac.uk) and Dawn Woolley (dawn.woolley@leeds-art.ac.uk) by September 8th, 2023. Chapters should be between 4,000-8,000 words.

Timeline

Proposal deadline: Friday, 8 September 2023

Acceptance/Non-acceptance notice: Friday, 6 October 2023

Chapter submission deadline: Friday, 26 January 2024 (chapters will undergo peer review)