Jack Faber

During my residency period, my main focus in residency is We’re Wolves – an expanded cinema / participatory art project through which we can shapeshift ourselves into Northern wolves and experience life from their unique perspective.

The project aims to connect people with each other through nature, a crucial matter in these times of uncertainty, isolation, limited mobility and inaccessibility to physical locations. ‘We’re Wolves’ suggests instead new forms of closeness, movement and togetherness as social survival strategies, realized through compassion and caring for others. By looking through the wild into the domesticated world, ‘We’re Wolves’ encourages us to rethink our basic values and a more balanced social priority.

The project takes the wolves’ prism as a way to see the wonders of life from a fresh perspective, as well as a metaphor for our current precarious position. Once apex predators, nowadays, many wolf communities struggle to survive and have a vulnerable position. They became soft targets for populistic political parties (as in Germany) who raise ancient fears based on folklore – portraying them as invaders, an analogy for foreigners to be fearful of. ‘We’re Wolves’ offers a path of empathy instead.

I see the retreat, with its supportive and creative environment, as a perfect meeting place for sharing interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative working methods. Dealing with crucial issues, the residency is an opportunity to be part of a productive community and to create a mutual body of knowledge through productive individual and collective activities. It is a chance to learn, to reflect, to grow as an artist, to share ideas and new knowledge while fostering new professional relationships and future collaborations.

I expect to be inspired by the place and its inhabitants, to experience its new environment and how my artistic practice is developed and reacted to by my peer participants and professionals working in the residence – while in process.

By enabling us to experience the life of other species that share our place of existence, we can better understand our mutual relations as well as the great importance of treating nature and its inhabitants with respect and equality. Creating such an emphatic link is invaluable to our sustainability and shared responsibility as a society.
I’m aiming at creating such a link through various methods including the Exploration of acoustic, cinematic and Virtual spaces as artistic expressions and advanced therapeutic platforms, field recordings, documenting, peer Feedback, re-appropriation, investigation of acoustic ecologies, researching togetherness and closeness as artistic strategies.