Feral Partnerships
Feral Partnerships is a collaboration between James Powell, Beth Fisher, Matthew Darmour-Paul, and Enrico Brondelli di Brondello. The group is interested in stories of entangled ecologies and world-making projects that meet at and within the boundaries of what is perceived to be “the built environment.” They received a grant for a project that advocates for architecture as a spatial practice dedicated to multi-species flourishing. Feral Partnerships aimed to develop case studies of the architecture of human and animal cohabitation and presented them in exhibitions and workshops of interest to those involved in design, construction and policy-making in London. They write:
The project, through its web archive, exhibition, and workshopping formats, intends to reach both a public and a professional audience. It hopes to provide a key resource for architects, landscape architects, urbanists, policy-makers, and ecologists, as well as being of wider interest to artists, chefs, foragers, farmers, concerned citizens, lobbyists, conservationists, and students in the environmental humanities. Our involvement in the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) in London, leading the biodiversity pressure group, ensures we will have an audience and a stake in the future of development policy and ecologically regenerative protocols for the city.
While the COVID-19 pandemic delayed Feral Partnerships’ timescales and brought forth unexpected challenges, they nonetheless managed to showcase their work by focusing on case study research and exhibition design and shifting the location of their exhibition from London to Sydney. In April 2021, Feral Partnerships exhibited their work “The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation” at the University of Sydney’s ‘Tin Sheds’ Gallery in April, alongside other events with the Multispecies Initiative and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. They also presented their work at the 2020 POLLEN Political Ecology conference in September 2020, which was held virtually to a global audience. They have shared a series of architectural case studies on Instagram and are building a digital archive website to reach a wider audience.