Feral by occupation
As the Feral Labs Network’s Rewilding Cultures programme (2022–2026) comes soon to an end, we are launching a series of essays drawn from the 2024 Feral Labs Node Book #2 and the upcoming #3 issue. The first in the series is an essay by Kate Rich, founder of the legendary Feral Trade project and facilitator of the Feral MBA, a radically reimagined business education programme for artists and other professionals in Lakes Entrance, Australia.
I’ve been working with the feral from the inside—as a form of inhabitation—for over 20 years. It started with Feral Trade (established 2003), a grocery import-export business, art endeavour and long-range economic experiment, trading coffee, olive oil, and other vital goods via social and cultural routes. The enterprise was fuelled by questions crackling at the edges of my attention at the time. What is a commodity? How does trade work? As an artist, how can I think about livelihood in this cultural field that is both hugely supportive of experimenting with the world as material and relentlessly itinerant and project-based? Rather than an endless stream of new projects, what if I double down and do the same thing again on repeat, just with more depth and resolution as time goes by?
Feral Trade
Feral Trade began from these basic yet burning questions. Over the years, it took on its own, highly particular shape. All my suppliers and all my customers are gleaned through social connections. Goods are dispatched worldwide, primarily in the spare baggage space of friends, colleagues and passing acquaintances travelling on commuter, vacation, cultural and diasporic business. Operating ad hoc, from home, with no business infrastructure (or plan), other than a hand-coded online database, I ended up with an underground freight network that is at least as resilient and reliable as DHL.
Naming this sprawling operation “feral” trade was initially a throwaway line, to get away from the extravagant claims to liberty or justice that “free” and “fair” trade put out. Over time, the connection became both more specific and expansive. As a status, the feral is generally conferred from outside, commonly as an expression of annoyance or dislike, a slur on characters who do not fit the desired picture. Its connotations include “going” feral, being invasive, causing disruption, being disorderly, wandering all over the place (1). Applied from within as a piece of self-description, the word takes on a different type of agency. With Feral Trade, I took as my icon the common urban pigeon, a near neighbour. Not trespassing as such, the pigeon makes a lively living among sometimes hostile systems, strutting across property lines, mingling human and non-human worlds with a pigeon’s demeanour that does not recognise the difference.
Introduced into the context of business, the feral brings with it a certain frisson. It stands askance to the expectations of “ethical” business and the often debilitating imperative to (only) be “good” or do “right”. An amorphous character that veers between categories, the feral is intricately related to its surroundings, including those it might contest. As such, the feral business does not lay claims to virtue, or get cleansed of its many attachments to the troubled business world at large (as ethical business might imply). Instead, it is embroiled in, and curious about, the mixed and complex systems that it operates in.
The above is all to say that I moved into the feral without much forethought and settled there. The grocery dealership became a platform for everything else—blurring art and business, able to wax and wane its operations in accordance with the interests and energy of its operator and the shifting conditions of its operating environment—a life story. Then, after 20 years as a sole trader and feral economist in the field, I put the grocery business on hold—shelved it as it were with its 1,273 deliveries to date, proof of concept enough!—and took the leap to widen my enquiry into what else business could look like, in company (2).
Feral MBA
That is at least one of the backstories behind the Feral MBA, a radically re-imagined training course in business for artists and others. Established as an experiment in 2020, the Feral MBA opened its doors as a short yet deep course, far from the high voltage hotspots and hatcheries of regular business education and advice, the Business School and the start-up incubators.
The Feral MBA takes its idea of business from activist lawyer Janelle Orsi: “Think of an enterprise as any productive activity that could bring us sustenance” (3). This makes for an expansive understanding of what business could mean, beyond the clear markers of social enterprise (or business for “good”). What it opens the door to is a wild array of business shapes and quandaries. Those who come to [arrive at / apply to] the Feral MBA include artists who struggle to apply the creative side of their practice to the livelihood aspect. Or small and micro-business owners who are thinking imaginatively with business as a medium, but lack a language and a community for that dimension of their work. Some are stringing together multiple livelihoods, others are operating in the margins of what would be recognised as business. People attempting to square what they are doing with the pressures of making a living and an unremitting background assumption of what business would be. Resistant to grouping together as an industry or sector, what these projects and people have in common is a strong sense that the business structures and categories on offer do not fit what they do.
To turn away from a strong ideology of business requires undoing ingrained habits of mind, to make space for new ones. The programme of the Feral MBA strays far from the classic MBA curriculum of strategy, finance, marketing and management. Rather than presenting new models or pathways to success, it offers an invitation to experiment with uncertainty. Taking on the troubled trappings of business, we venture together into the charged and uncanny areas of money and administration to consider what else success in business might look like, within a feminist understanding of economy as surviving well together (4), unravelling the Master of Business Administration, the Business School’s premiere degree, into a radically different form.
Calling this programme the Feral MBA is (also) key to what it does. The name works as a piece of agitprop: an act of invocation or social magic, with the potential to jump barricades and loop back into a wider business conversation. Not set up in opposition to the Business School, but a wandering spirit. I am interested here in the potential of the feral to run interference in the super-naturalised arena of business, suffused as it is in economic “laws” of rational self-interest, growth and competition that go without saying as the way things are. Just as the feral animal “puts pressure on the idea of nature” (5), the potential of the feral in business is to wilfully imagine the options for subsistence and survival outside of a seemingly inevitable economic order. In doing so, it opens portholes into other possible business worlds.
At time of writing, the Feral MBA has set up shop in the creative wild community of FLOAT, Lakes Entrance, far east Australia, as an annual short (but deep) course. A business endeavour in itself, funded by participant fees, business sponsors and a wealth of other, non-financial resources—as the Budget lays out.
The pigeon stays on as the programme mascot. In stepping together into business and economy —spaces where things often feel stuck—we are feralising (rather than innovating) a way out. Not entering the Business School (except for lunch), the Feral MBA remains on the outside, on its feet and on the move.
Notes
(1) Alexis Harley, “Outlaws and familiars.” Unlikely Journal of the Creative Arts (2015). unlikely.net.au/issue-1/about-43.
(2) feraltrade.org/courier
(3) Janelle Orsi, Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2012).
(4) Community Economies Institute: communityeconomies.org/about/community- economies-research-and-practice
(5) Alexis Harley, “Outlaws and familiars.” Unlikely Journal of the Creative Arts (2015). unlikely.net.au/issue-1/about-43.
Next FLOAT – Feral MBA: Feb 14- March 22 2026, Lakes Entrance/Lake Tyers, East Gippsland, Victoria, Australia
Learn more about Feral Trade, Rewilding Cultures and the Feral Labs Network.
This essay was originally published in Feral Labs Node Book #2, Feralities, Yvonne Billimore, Tina Dolinšek, Uroš Veber (eds.), Bioart Society, Zavod Projekt Atol, 2024. Download here.