Wild. Unbounded. Rootless. Predators off the hook. This is the cultural representation of wilderness embodied in our dominant imaginaries across Europe. Wild is when an eagle catches its pray. When wolfs haul, when bears attack, when snakes bite. Wild is explosive, rapturous, and immoral. Hence when humans want to unleash their wilderness, screaming and violence is on the menu.
We are a three year old Istok and two cultural workers, educators and wonderers from Serbia, Višnja and Goran, currently serving as caretakers of the Forest University and we wanted to challenge that view of wilderness, often true, but very partial and simplistic. Walking in an old growth forest - a quintessential place of wilderness - one has to wait awful lot for such wilderness to happen. Instead, the dominant sound of wilderness is silence. Tranquil existence of trees dropping fruits of leaves from time to time. Even loud moments in a wild place are often singing, mating, buzzing, feeding, sharing. More meditative than explosive, more symbiotic than violent. Sleepy wilderness freed not from mercy, but from hustle. No deadlines to meet, no plans to fulfill, nothing to transcend. A grounded presence and a lot of patience.
Our "symbiotic movement" trip from the Southern banks of the Pannonian plain (Serbia) to the Arctic circle (Finland), takes us on an exploration of this slow, symbiotic wilderness and ways of moving through it. Moving slowly, without a set plan and a determined course, we stay in various national parks, reserves and non-listed, random rivers and lake shores. Sleeping where we can (mostly in our car), and wandering a lot, we have our senses opened for wisdoms and teachings that can be found on such places, still not silenced by the explosive, aggressive, colonizing culture always-in-a-hurry.
Our main method of learning on this trip is by engaging with various creatures we meet in the form of a “masterclass with the more-than-human teacher” in which we spend a typical school hour with a plant, water, rock, animal, or symbiotic couples which invites us to share its teachings. In doing this, we are not the ones legitimizing these teachings, trying to represent our teacher in the most understandable way for other humans, nor making sure that every other human would receive the same teachings. Teaching is an act of contextual, affective, bodily, and cognitive interaction between beings that share that very moment of wondering together. It is a symbiotic movement, a movement beyond what we were thought to think and beyond ways in which we were taught to learn.
We document these teachings in our diaries, and as recordings as they happen. Understanding these encounters as intercultural and educational, we desire to shake the dominant, anthropocentric imaginaries of cultural exchange and mobility. In the sequel to this article, we hope to share some of the teachings from this wild, symbiotic journey.