Feral Attraction

Abstract

Feral Attraction explores the disconnection between empiricism and cultural determinacy and consider the effects of cultural blindfolding in a context of environmental fatalism. The project focuses on the site of the Vestfjords, a remote area in the North West of Iceland, which became the theatre for the enactment of urban/rural ideological tensions and ultimately, a frenetic and awkward resolution involving the herding and eventual eradication of a community of feral animals. The Vestfjords is an environment, which during the twentieth century has been increasingly host to controversy surrounding the inexorable population drain from a rural to urban way of life involving two gradual processes. One was the migration of people from farming regions into coastal towns (including Reykjavik) and the abandonment of farms in large parts of the Vestfjords. The second was the persistent out-migration from the region as a whole, including its coastal towns, both small and large. The herding narrative that follows in some way mirrors the management of remote farming families and small communities, the continuing presence of which came to be considered from an administrative perspective, to be an unsustainable drain on the wider National project. Our art research project focuses on the significance of imagery in the story and on the particular resonance of visual information in the accumulation and instrumentalisation of knowledge as the events unfolded.