Writing Wildness
Research and reflections on the theme of FIBER Festival 2025: Wildness
For its 10th anniversary edition, FIBER Festival turned its attention to Wildness. In the face of ecological collapse, genocide, accelerated technologies, and institutional inertia, rewilding becomes both a call and a practice: to untame our systems, our thinking, and ourselves. What does it mean to rewild not only our ecosystems, but also our technologies, cultural practices, and inner lives? As FIBER marks this milestone, we look at our own growth through this lens: how can we resist institutional domestication and remain open to the feral and the fluid? Which artistic and sonic practices cultivate this disorder of desire, and what futures might take root from its fertile ground?
This line of inquiry ran throughout the 2025 programme, which embraced a pluriversal approach to wildness, interrogating how humans, technologies, and ecosystems can inhabit mutual, sometimes wild, entanglements. Among others, it traced ecological resistance, reimagined relations with the more-than-human, and engaged the material thinking of living electronics. The opening keynote by Dr. Stacy Alaimo and Josèfa Ntjam wove together oceanic ecologies, rhizomatic temporalities, and Black and queer futurities. Across artist talks, live concerts, and club nights, these threads coalesced into sonic mutations, spectral visual universes, and off-kilter theoretical explorations that together invited audiences to inhabit wildness themselves and imagine more symbiotic ways of being.
Conceptually illuminating this terrain is the work of Jack Halberstam, and especially the book Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Here Halberstam writes of wildness not as chaos or lack, but as a generative force: a refusal of discipline, order, and legibility. Wildness as a strategy of resistance: to normative structures, to extractive systems, to the logics of control that govern both bodies and environments. In Halberstam’s framing, wildness is not a return to some imagined natural state, but a practice of unlearning, of embracing the unruly, the feral, the relational, and the unknown.
Contributions
This editorial dossier gathers a constellation of reflections, essays, and interviews responding to the festival’s 2025 theme. It offers not a fixed map but a series of trails – tracing how artists, musicians, designers, and researchers are working with and within wildness. How can artistic practices resist domestication and instead move toward more porous and speculative ways of being (with)?
From installations and performances to talks and digital experiments, the texts in this dossier respond to key moments across FIBER 2025 and offer critical insights into the practices shaping this year’s programme. Whether through intimate conversations with participating artists, speculative essays, or field notes from the festival itself, this series is an invitation to consider (and feel) wildness in its many forms:
Anna Lina Litz ponders alongside Xandra van der Eijk about what it means to represent a river, the value of artistic fieldwork, and the uneasy intimacy of studying an ecosystem bound by human control. She then drifts through Matteo Marangoni’s Chorusing Symbionts, a conversation where art, science, wildness, and control meet.
Callum McLean speaks with Navid Navab about Organism, an alchemical exploration of life’s emergent properties that challenges the domination of nature through sound and matter.
Chiara Pitrola guides us through Ioana Vreme Moser’s soft, leaky machines, where failure, memory, and tenderness become tools for reimagining computation as an embodied, relational practice.
Eleni Maragkou traces submerged and speculative imaginaries where wildness becomes a method for worldmaking across oceanic, posthuman, and algorithmic terrains, from Drexciya’s Black aquatopia to Josèfa Ntjam’s interplanetary assemblages.
Léa Shamaa listens to Matteo Marangoni’s Komorebi and meditates on the porous boundaries between nature and technology.
Mila Narjollet invites Diane Mahín to reflect on how sonic wildness unsettles the borders between violence, otherness, and transformation.
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