Feral-feminism
Toward an Ethics of Adaptive Coexistence
For David Harvey, mapping space is “a fundamental prerequisite to the structuring of any kind of knowledge… no matter whether the space being mapped is metaphorical or real.”
The Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson explains this process particularly well. In one of his presentations, he asks: “What is geography if it is not the drawing and interpretation of the line? And what is the drawing of a line if it is not also the creation of new objects? Which lines we draw, how we draw them, the effects they have, and how they change are the crucial questions.”
Similarly, Sonenberg writes in Cartographies: “It has always been this way with the mapmakers: from their first scratches on the cave wall to show the migration patterns of the herds, they have traced lines and lived inside them.”
Whether we are speaking about mental or physical spaces—and the two are inseparable—space is produced through the principle of mapping. Once mapped, space begins to organize the structures and practices through which knowledge is produced. It is through this knowledge that we later come to understand and act upon the world.
The act of drawing lines, which lies at the heart of all mapping practices, may appear innocent or even playful. Yet it is a process with profound consequences. The lines we draw shape ways of living, distribute power, and determine who is recognized as a subject within a given landscape. In this sense, the production of subjects and the distribution of power are among the most important elements—perhaps the only truly important elements—within any landscape.
As another artistic practice rooted in the concept coined by Gilles Clément, the following pages propose an exploration of life within the Third Landscape. While Clément identifies the Third Landscape through its biological characteristics, understanding it as a potential refuge for plants, animals, and perhaps humans, my work seeks to engage with this space from a different perspective. Rather than merely observing the Third Landscape, I ask what forms of life might emerge if we were to inhabit it.
This question led me to consider feral feminism as the most appropriate conceptual framework. By imagining human existence within the Third Landscape, I became interested in forms of subjectivity and coexistence that resist domestication, control, and fixed social orders. In this sense, feral feminism offers a way of thinking through the untamed, the marginal, and the more-than-human dimensions of life that the Third Landscape makes possible.
Once started as a fight for fundamental human rights, feminism has grown into a way of rethinking how we understand ourselves and our relations to others. It raises the question of what we mean when we say “we,” while equally asking who we are to one another within that collective. In this sense, feral-feminism is not fixed to a stable identity, but continuously reshapes the borders through which identity itself is constructed. To use the words of Donna Haraway, (feral)feminist “practice is the construction of that form of consciousness — that is, the self-knowledge of a non-existent self.” Through this destabilisation of fixed categories, feral-feminism opens space for new concepts, new bodies, and new subjectivities, leaving us with countless possibilities for imagining different forms of existence and coexistence.
At the same time, contemporary life is increasingly structured through systems of regulation, extraction, visibility, and control. Urban environments are reorganised according to logics of efficiency; bodies are disciplined through productivity and categorisation; ecological systems are reduced to resources to be managed and optimised. Under such conditions, coexistence is often understood only insofar as it remains governable. What exceeds regulation becomes framed as disorder, excess, or threat. Yet within these highly controlled landscapes, forms of life continue to emerge that resist complete containment. Spontaneous vegetation pushes through concrete surfaces, informal communities reshape neglected urban spaces, and marginal ecologies persist within overlooked environments. These sites reveal that relationality cannot be fully organised through structures of domination.
Feral-feminism emerges from this recognition. It proposes a feminist mode of thinking grounded not in mastery, purity, or separation, but in adaptability, permeability, and situated coexistence. The feral, in this context, does not signify savagery or abandonment. Rather, it names the capacity of life to reorganise itself beyond imposed structures while remaining deeply relational. Ferality describes forms of becoming that develop within the cracks of regulated systems, where survival depends upon responsiveness, interdependence, and mutual adjustment.
As I define it, feral-feminism is an embodied and ecological ethics grounded in the understanding that bodies are never autonomous entities sealed from their environments. Bodies are porous, vulnerable, adaptive, and continuously shaped through contact with human and more-than-human worlds. From this perspective, care is not an abstract moral principle but a material condition of coexistence. To exist is already to be entangled with infrastructures, climates, organisms, architectures, histories, and social relations that exceed the individual self.
Feral-feminism therefore shifts attention away from ideals of domination and toward practices of attentiveness. It asks how we might inhabit environments differently — not through control, but through reciprocal responsiveness. Rather than imagining liberation as transcendence from existing conditions, feral-feminism locates transformative potential within the neglected, unstable, and partially uncontrolled spaces already embedded within everyday life.
//////
The Feral as Feminist Condition
The figure of the feral occupies an ambiguous cultural position. Historically, the feral has often been associated with danger, contamination, unruliness, or failed domestication. Feminist bodies themselves have frequently been described through similar language: excessive, emotional, irrational, uncontrollable. Patriarchal systems depend upon distinctions between culture and nature, civilisation and wildness, order and disorder. Within these binaries, the feminine is repeatedly positioned closer to the natural and therefore imagined as requiring discipline and regulation.
Feral-feminism does not seek to reverse this hierarchy by romanticising wildness as purity or freedom. Instead, it destabilises the binary itself. The feral is neither outside civilisation nor entirely contained within it. Ferality emerges through contact zones where systems of control become incomplete. It is produced relationally. A feral ecology develops not through isolation from human structures, but through partial withdrawal from total regulation.
This distinction is crucial. Feral-feminism is not an escape fantasy. It does not advocate returning to an imagined pre-social state, nor does it idealise untouched nature. Rather, it recognises that contemporary life is already characterised by entanglement, hybridity, and dependency. The feral names the adaptive capacities that emerge within these entanglements.
To think ferally is therefore to reject fantasies of purity—whether ecological, political, or bodily. It is to acknowledge contamination, vulnerability, and mutual exposure as conditions of existence. Such a framework resists individualism by understanding survival itself as collective and relational. No body survives alone; no environment exists independently from networks of exchange and influence.
From this perspective, feminism becomes not solely a struggle for representation within existing structures, but a broader reorientation toward forms of coexistence that exceed domination. Feral-feminism asks how relationality itself might become the basis for political and ethical life.
Kristijan RADAKOVIC
artist / curator
artist / curator
IG @nouvelorganon