The exhibition «Feralocene» explores the increasingly porous boundary between the wild and the domesticated, between nature and human-made environments. The term feral refers to that which has gone wild – beings and systems that have broken free from human control and operate autonomously. This may include animals that have adapted to urban environments, plants growing on abandoned construction sites, or carbon dioxide circulating freely in the atmosphere.

We humans coexist with both living and non-living organisms and phenomena. We influence each other and are mutually dependent. Non-human agents make use of our urban spaces, buildings, and systems – regardless of their intended functions. In the margins of human infrastructure, they often manage to hack our systems and create unpredictable ecological patterns. In doing so, they challenge our assumptions about control, domestication, and nature’s place in our lives.

At North Norwegian Art Centre, the artist group Alt Går Bra presents a project grounded in their encounters with the feral,in the form of city pigeons. The project, as a whole, is interwoven with contemporary thinking on attention and ecology.

City pigeons live freely in human constructed environments and are descendants of homing and carrier pigeons. Their presence may be perceived as a nuisance – they behave like animals – yet they often go unnoticed, as part of the urban fabric. This duality speaks to nature’s ability to be both resilient and subversive on one hand, and highly adaptive on the other.

Two prominent contemporary thinkers have been central to the conceptualization of «Feralocene»: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Claire Bishop. Tsing, an anthropologist, is known for her interdisciplinary research on the Anthropocene – the proposed geological epoch in which human activity has altered the Earth’s surface. Together with colleagues, she argues that we live in a “patchy Anthropocene.” By this, they mean that while human impact is global, it is distributed unevenly – like a patchwork across time and space. These “patches” are unique events, but they form a pattern. This generates a new form of attention, in which we sense the specific in the global – and the global in the specific. According to Tsing, field observation, presence, and unpredictability become methods for understanding a world in flux.

Claire Bishop, in Disordered Attention, describes how our capacity for concentration has become disrupted and scattered. Our attention and way of perceiving the world are no longer contemplative acts, but rather take place in a fragmented, networked space – where we are both present and absent, both digital and physical.

By bringing these perspectives together, Alt Går Bra draws attention to new forms of sensory experience and a polyphonic view of the world. The field guide – in Tsing’s sense – becomes not just a scientific method, but also an artistic form: a tool for seeing, naming, and experiencing the more-than-human landscape we are part of. In this context, Bishop becomes equally relevant: Art created in and for an audience with fragmented and distracted attention calls for new strategies. The artworks offer various forms of observation, sensory impressions, and knowledge – layered rather than smoothed into a single narrative.

Through a series of paintings, a sound piece, a video, and spatialinterventions,«Feralocene» examines how we perceive and relate to such liminal states in our time.

Central to the exhibition are artistic strategies and reflections on beings and phenomena we often overlook – such as city pigeons and plants growing in cracks in the concrete. A bird’s-eye view takes the lead and forms the basis for the main installation.

In the project space, we can lose ourselves in a landscape of old and new technologies through a video work that combines physical objects with the artists’ own film and video recordings. The soundscape consists of field recordings and AI-generated audio snippets.Once again, the unpredictable spreads beyond human control and intent.

The exhibition also frames attention as an ecological practice. It requires – and trains – a gaze that is neither centered nor goal-oriented, but rather sensitive and diffuse. Through a sensory visual language, «Feralocene» invites the audience to rethink the relationship between humans and non-human beings. What does it mean to live in a time when the boundary between nature and culture is blurred, and even the most unassuming forms of life are part of our global history? What does it mean to tune into a feral rhythm – to surrender to observation and coexistence, rather than control and narrative order?

«Feralocene» offers a space for attention and wonder – not to explain, but to attune, to listen, to see – and perhaps to sense the contours of another way of being in the world.

The artist collective Alt Går Bra is based in Bergen and Paris. It wasfounded by Agnes Nedregård and Branko Boero Imwinkelried in 2015. Alt Går Bra has exhibited at prestigious institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Palais de Tokyo, the National Museum in Oslo, and KODE in Bergen. Their works are part of several public collections, including the Tate Archives and Library, the John Flaxman Library in Chicago, the National Museum, and KODE. Alt Går Bra are regular contributors to the magazine Billedkunst.