Bioart Society selected Višnja Kisić and Goran Tomka for Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation 2024 via the open call that was held in spring 2024.
During their mobility, Višnja Kisić and Goran Tomka will travel through the forest ecosystems in Eastern and Northeastern Europe, learn from the places they visit and beings that inhabit them. Taking symbiosis as a starting point, Višnja and Goran want to experience and learn from ecosystems similar to the one they live in, which the National Park of Fruška gora in Serbia. Along the way they wish to meet and connect with ecovillages and cultural initiatives which practice ecological ways of being and work at the culture/nature intersection.
They will embark their travels from Hungary in August and end in Helsinki in September to exchange with Andrew Gryf Paterson, who visited Višnja and Goran in October 2023, as part of their Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation.
For Višnja and Goran, caretakers of the Forest University, forest is a teacher in mutual aid and interspecies collaboration; in continuous undisciplined becoming and complexity that escapes definitions; in troubled, embraced interdependent quest for life, and ultimately, other ways of imagining and practicing culture. If beings of the forests would advise us on rewilding our own ways and understandings – how could we embrace these teachings beyond laboratories, taxonomies, objectification and representation? How can these honest interactions morph us, making us explore our inner wilderness?
Višnja Kisić and Goran Tomka are a duo of eco-culturologists, with intertwined life paths, including parenting, living, wondering and creating together. They explore cultural issues, and their socio-political, economic and ecological relations. They are indebted to critical theory – leftist, feminist, decolonial thought – and interested in alternatives to hegemonic ways of being. They teach at several universities and are engaged in non-institutional cultural sector in Europe.
In 2016, Višnja and Goran felt the calling for more radical departure from urban ways of living, and settled on the border of the forest of Fruška Gora. This land and its beings have gifted them with numerous un-learnings of old ways and teachings of other kind. Most of their practices have been DIT, caring for the land, practicing natural building, permaculture, and autonomy. This grounding has meant degrowing their careers and travel arrangements, approaching culture through ecological lens, and birthing the Forest University.