Feral-feminism

Toward an Ethics of Adaptive Coexistence

This entirely anthropocentric work is about the possibility to reconfigure, redefine, reshape a human invention – feminism, its configuration, definition, shape. What feminism is, we can see by observing the subjects it produces and the relations between them, as well as the landscapes through which those relations become possible.

As another artistic practice, rooted in the concept coined by Gilles Clément, the following pages are suggesting a feminism in the Third Landscape. While Gilles Clément discovers the Third Landscape, relying on its biological characteristics and seeing it as a possible fugitive space for plants, animals and maybe humans, in my work I am possibly doing the same. For this work I’ve asked myself: what would feminism be like if it were situated in the Third Landscape?

Being aware of the limits of my own lines, once imagining feminism in the Third Landscape, the different theories which I picked up along the way connected perfectly in my head, giving me the answer to the questions of its metaphysics, its logics, its participants and their politics, their paradigms, and its landscapes.

With the redefined ‘we’, feminism in the Third Landscape is a place where ‘we’ is made of bodies of water, whose logic is hydrologic and whose bodies are connected through the oceanic feeling. It is a place where the answers to the questions of who are we and who are we to each other are to be found in the low waters of theories where the solid structure is not a conditio sine qua non, and where the best way to go is to go with the flow and cruise, as “the best kind of prize is a surprise.”

Before I continue with the subject, I would like to remind you how this text is solely based on my own metaphysical assumptions; assumptions marked by different aspects such as economical, sociological, philosophical, personal, material, etc.

So, ‘the truth’ is, as always, subjective, feral. It is produced, confirmed and executed by the space, within the space and for the space. The feminism proposed here is no exception: it is situated, contingent, and inseparable from the landscapes that sustain it.

For David Harvey, mapping space is “a fundamental prerequisite to the structuring of any kind of knowledge… no matter whether the space being mapped is metaphorical or real.” If feminism is understood as a practice of producing knowledge rather than merely an object of study, then mapping becomes one of its fundamental operations: it determines what can be seen, who can appear, and which relations become possible.

In one of his presentations, the Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson explains the mapping process quite clearly: “What is geography if it is not the drawing and interpretation of the line? And what is the drawing of a line if it is not also the creation of new objects? Which lines we draw, how we draw them, the effects they have, and how they change are the crucial questions.”

Sonenberg wrote in Cartographies: “It has always been this way with the mapmakers: from their first scratches on the cave wall to show the migration patterns of the herds, they have traced lines and lived inside them.”

Feminism, like space itself, is constituted through acts of mapping. Whether we are speaking about mental or physical spaces (the two being inseparable), they are continuously defined by the lines through which they are imagined and organised. Once mapped, these spaces shape the structures and practices of knowledge production—the knowledge through which we later understand and act upon the world. The creation of lines, the seemingly innocent process of making maps, ultimately determines ways of living, the division of power, and who gets to live as a recognisable subject. Subjects and their power positions therefore become one of the central concerns of feminism, just as they have long structured our understanding of landscape.

It is precisely here that Gilles Clément’s concept of the Third Landscape becomes useful—not simply as a theory of neglected land, but as a possible geography for feminism.

In his talk before the Architectural Association, the gardener from the city of Versailles, Gilles Clément proposed three types of landscapes:

Forest: darkness, buildings, shadows.

Public spaces: lightness, clearness, lights.

The Third Landscape: places where humans do nothing.

Clément elaborated this concept in his Manifesto of the Third Landscape, published in 2019. The Third Landscape is the sum of neglected areas and, as an actual physical territory, can be found in many different configurations: urban environments, agricultural land, roadsides, railway embankments, or the spaces between places already assigned a function within the system they operate.

The name itself refers to the Third Estate described by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in his political pamphlet What is the Third Estate? Written shortly before the French Revolution of 1789, the text proposed that alongside the First and Second Estates—the clergy and the aristocracy—there existed the Third Estate: the common people. Sieyès argued for their political recognition and participation after centuries of being overlooked, ignored, and excluded from structures of power.

Clément recognised a similar condition while observing the landscapes of the Limousin region in France. It was this shared position of neglect that led him to name these spaces the Third Landscape. As he writes: “If we stop looking at the landscape as the object of the industry, we suddenly discover… a quantity of undecided spaces, devoid of function, that are difficult to name… Third Landscape refers to the Third State (not Third World)—space expressing neither power nor submission to power.”

For feminism, this shift is significant. The Third Landscape is not only a physical territory but also a way of thinking about spaces and subjects that escape dominant classifications. It proposes a place that neither reproduces established hierarchies nor simply inverts them, but suspends them long enough for different relations to emerge.

Comparing these neglected landscapes, Clément noticed that although they shared no common form, they were united by one essential characteristic: they functioned as refuge areas for diversity. Diversity no longer survives in spaces that are either entirely natural or entirely organised by humans, regardless of their purpose. “Diversity refers to the number of distinct living species among animals, plants and simple beings (bacteria, viruses, etc.); the human number is included in a single species whose diversity is expressed by ethnic and cultural varieties… It is located on the margins… These margins bring together a biological diversity that had not yet been classified as richness. The Third Landscape is a connective fabric composed of residual spaces that tend to take a liquid state, never preserving shape and resisting governance. All the diversity comes here.”

Rather than borrowing the Third Landscape merely as a metaphor, I understand it as the landscape within which this feminism takes place. Its undecided, residual and fluid character offers the conditions for imagining subjects and relations that cannot be fully accommodated within dominant political, social or epistemological landscapes. In this sense, feminism does not abandon landscape; it inhabits it differently.