Depta-Garapich, Katarzyna; (2025) “Neither Subject nor Object”: Ferality, Solastalgia and Strange Tools of Situated Practice. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

My practice-led research project “Neither Subject nor Object”: Ferality, Solastalgia and Strange Tools of Situated Practice explores how solastalgia, emotional and existential distress caused by environmental change and the personal experience of grief and anxiety can be articulated through art practice. The investigation is devoted to the relationship between nature, art and society and involves a site-specific project that has a potential to activate artistic response from others and lead to lasting continuous action that benefits network of individuals that include non-human persons. The case study is situated on the intersection between rural and urban environments in Zakopane and the Tatra Mountains in Poland. This project tackles the superficiality of the representation of the white bear mascot that in new incarnations has been posing for photographs with tourists in Zakopane since the 1920s. The absurd popularity of the ‘white bear’ confronted with the brown bear (Ursus arctos), a local endangered species, has triggered the project’s main axis, related to the question whether art can be useful to transform the way people think and behave and role of the artist in creating the opportunity for it to happen. Through its specific location, the project becomes positioned within debates around the climate crisis and ecological and ethical issues resulting from the impact of human behaviour on nature and on brown bears in the Tatra Mountains in particular. My research methodology involves historical, practical and critical inquiry situated in relation to artistic practices oriented towards human non-human relationships, widely defined land art and performance in public space with the unintentional participation of accidental viewers. My method of working is multidirectional and includes studio based sculptural work, drawing, costume making, in-camera performance and multi-screen video installation framed by a semi-fantastical autobiographical narrative that uses critical fabulation, a method of storytelling that addresses gaps in historical and factual knowledge. Donna Haraway in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, states that nature and culture are inseparable (natureculture) and the attempts to divide them amounts to violence. The word that signifies oppressive relationship between culture and nature is ferality – defined as a return to the wild state after the period of domestication, simultaneously imposing the superiority of the domestic state over the feral. I propose to strip ferality from its pejorative meaning and use it as a tool and an artistic strategy to activate the transformative function of art.

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