Follow us in Autumn 2025 as we continue with podcast episodes on feral matters. School of Feral Grounds works with peculiar, Krater-alike sites across European cities.
The School of Feral Grounds is an educational programme produced by Trajna as part of the Future DiverCities project. In a series of three interactive study modules, participants will dive into diverse topics of urban ecology and different perspectives thereon, together with inspiring guest speakers working in the fields of visual arts and curation, activism, geography, and ecology. The programme is developed and run by architect and theoretician Danica Sretenović and eco-social designer Gaja Mežnarić Osole, and is offered to the public free of charge.
The School of Feral Grounds situates cultural practices in the world in which capital-driven economies act as geological forces, terraforming the earth into a place where climate change, social inequality, and species extinction call for urgent collective action. The school acts as a forum for interchange, where reflections, concepts, case studies, and generative exercises invite participants to position urban ecologies within the field of culture by interlinking common notions of the urban and ecology.
Situated in the experience of running the production laboratory Krater and the Feral Palace urgent pedagogy, the school nurtures a collaborative learning environment for thinking and engaging with untamed urban sites. To support their eco-social regeneration, it works to enhance cultural workers’ capacities in regenerative place-making and place-keeping, artistic curation, programming, and advocacy.
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The programme consists of three study modules:
SM1: Human impacts on urban ecosystems
A set of interactive lectures and live conversations with experts on practices that look at human impact at various scales: planetary, city, and site-specific.
SM2: Recontextualisation: tools of seeing site ecology and culture
A series of mapping and analysis exercises that explore the dynamics of the legal, organizational, more-than-human, and other constitutional bodies of the degraded sites.
SM3: Designing for regenerative landscapes
A cycle of talks and discussions with invited artists, designers, (landscape) architects, and ecologists to navigate the production of tactics & strategies for designing regenerative interventions.
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Human impacts on urban ecosystems videolectures
The Planetary Scale:
Short introduction to the Anthropocene
Before delving into the specific topics of urban ecology, the introductory lecture offers a set of philosophical concepts, scientific findings, and situated observations for understanding the contemporary planetary condition – the Anthropocene. Gaja Mežnarić Osole in conversation with artist Debra Solomon and lawyer Aljoša Petek.
The City Scale:
Feral urbanism for 21st century cities that were once cultivated and went wild
The lecture discusses often invisible though instrumental operations fuelling urban inequalities – physical manifestations of neoliberal governance models and policies, protocols of land trade, and the lack of legislation acknowledging multispecies spatial rights. How to treat such knowledge as the object of cultural politics? Danica Sretenović in conversation with artist Ibrahim Mahama and landscape architect Urška Škerl.
The Site Scale:
Feral ecosystems as laboratories for cultivating interspecies collaboration & care
As a consequence of diverse political and economic conflicts, our post-industrial cities are seeing a rise in neglected urban environments (e.g. construction sites, houses, factories, roads etc.) reclaimed by nature. Instead of treating them as precarious landscapes on the road to extinction at the hands of human-centric infrastructures, this lecture explores feral ecosystems as creative laboratories of multispecies encounters and care. Gaja Mežnarić Osole, Primož Turnšek and Danica Sretenović in conversation with landscape architect Violeta Burckhardt.
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All the lectures were followed by a live discussion with invited guest speakers and participating members of the audience. Click to watch The School of The Feral Grounds video lectures!
Designing for regenerative landscapes podcasts
The School of the Feral Grounds‘ third and final learning module, Designing for regenerative landscapes, takes the form of a podcast series. Featuring inspirational guest speakers involved in urban curating, pedagogical work, publishing, art, design, and architecture, the series of thematic conversations are set to explore a variety of cultural approaches connected to ecological regeneration across diverse national contexts and spatial typologies. Despite the efforts of initiatives like the New European Bauhaus and EU policies to promote environmental sustainability, community-driven actions at the local level continue to face challenges such as precarity, ecological illiteracy, poverty, or disengaged local administrations. To work alongside the troubled terrains, each podcast episode delves into a specific topical lens with an invited practitioner, discussing creative approaches to bottom-up governance, ethical economics, critical publishing & education, planning for multispecies urbanism, and designing regenerative material cultures. By exposing social, ecological, and programmatic aspects of eco-cultural stewardship, the discussions aim to empower cultural actors across Europe to engage in resilient and continuous ecological actions.
Hosted and curated by Gaja Mežnarić Osole and Danica Sretenović. Produced by Görkem Özdemir. Music by Ida Hiršenfelder (beepblip).
#1 Curating ecological care & repair by Gilly Karjevsky, Floating University
For the opening conversation, Gilly Karjevsky will delve into curatorial approaches and formats rooted in ethics of care for our communities, our cities, and the planet. Derived from the word ‘curare,’ meaning ‘to cure,’ Karjevsky will offer radical imaginaries on tending to and healing our fractured relationships within urban ecologies by repositioning curatorial practice outside traditional institutional frameworks to engage with site-specific, multispecies contexts.
#2 Multispecies urbanism department with Debra Solomon
While recording the podcast series in mid April Ljubljana, we transitioned from summer to winter in just 4 hours, highlighting yet another reason why robust ecosystems in our cities are crucial for combating the climate extremes ahead. In a conversation with infrastructure activist Debra Solomon, we discuss the imperative for new forms of just urban development and spatial practice that foster reciprocal relationships between humans and more-than-humans. The discussion delves into speculative fabulation, envisioning a scenario where every European city establishes a department for multispecies urbanism to respond to the intersecting challenges of climate change and democracy. By addressing topics like ecosystem defragmentation and biodiversity corridors, more-than-human water purification, soil organism and its remediation, decommodification of food and more, the department engages with diverse locations across Europe, showcasing the conceptualization and implementation of a multispecies sensible public administration in locations like Kuopio, Liepāja, Marseille, Athens, and Londa.
#3 Designing economic cultures with Bianca Elzenbaumer
What happens when a designer shifts her focus from creating objects and graphics to designing economic cultures? By choosing not to engage in representational design activities, produce prestigious exhibitions, or build her career in prominent academic positions, Bianca Elzenbaumer’s daily commitment to social change in the Vallagarina valley attracts (young) people to stay. Discover how her 40-year project vision transforms disturbed Alpine valleys into vibrant rural settings through fizzy drinks production, a mobile pizza oven, situated pedagogies, and groundbreaking research into land commons. In the face of escalating climate change, biodiversity decline, and social isolation, she leverages the community economy theories of feminist geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham to reshape economic practices and improve the livelihoods of all living beings.
The process of collective knowledge production will set the stage for an ‘international feral movement’ dedicated to identifying, valorising, and regenerating feral sites across Europe and beyond.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Creative Europe. Neither the European Union nor Creative Europe can be held responsible for them.