Instagram Takeover: Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

"What do a dog and a tree have in common? Their bark!” Joke, anonymous.

"An animal is classified as feral when it is a former domestic animal living in a wild habitat, without food or shelter provided by humans, and showing some resistance to people”, biologists state. Some of the most common species that turn feral are cats, dogs, horses, and pigs. Once companion species, when the pact established thousands of years ago by codomestication is broken, they have the ability not to go back to being wolves, their wild ancestors in the case of dogs, but to become something else. They become feral. Claude Lévi-Strauss coined the concept of pensée sauvage (not la pensée des sauvages, as we are often reminded), a type of “untamed” thought, kept alive in the modern western world within “natural reserves” of art, as he would say. Dogs are not often considered wildlife; they are mostly a species-with-humans. Messmates. That does not mean they could not experience their own kind of pensée sauvage – or even a domesticated thought, who knows. But what mode of thought is expressed when these two worlds collapse, pacts are broken, their world is wounded, they become without-humans and thus feral? Is it possible that la pensée férale is one that makes surviving in the Anthropocene feasible?⁠

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Text Juliana Fausto, images Daniel Steegmann Mangrané⁠
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For each week in 2020, curator Maria Lind invites 52 artists to inhabit this account to make weekly proposals for the 2020s. See Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's takeover at @52proposalsforthe20s.⁠