Introduction to “Feral Domestic” video trilogy by Dani and Sheila ReStack
Introduction to a screening at PODIUM of the “Feral Domestic” video trilogy by Dani and Sheila Restack. This was part of the emerging performing arts festival MIND EATER 2026 in Oslo, curated by Louis Schou-Hansen and Runa Borch Skolseg.
“I was first introuduced to the works of Dani and Sheila Restack by Canadian film curator Erik Martinson. This was up in Lofoten in 2018, I think. We were watching hundreds of vimeo links in search of a selection we were making to that year’s art biennal in Lofoten, which is where I was studying my BA. We, ultimately, didn’t choose to program «Strangely Ordinary This Devotion», which is the first video of three that we’re gonna watch this evening. Yet it had left a pretty significant mark for me as an artist. The only other times in school I had this type of experience was watching the morbid 90s video stuff by Steve Reinke, or when I was even younger and a ludicrously pretentious film student, watching Chantal Akerman movies on my TV at home, via some obscure pirate link. Viewing ‘Strangely Ordinary’ felt like sensing a new type of texture, a reverberation that was not something to relate to in codified terms, but otherwise. In short, it was seeing something really experimental and really weird. After combing through those all those vimeo links with Erik, this was the one that finally caused me to sit there and think «I don’t know what I’m watching». And having this thought is usually a very good sign (paraphrasing film writer and curator Mike Sperlinger here). Despite not «understanding it» I also felt a strong correlation to the material, which is why it’s been in the back of my mind all these years.
Now, when I was doing my master’s at the art academy, I was doing my thesis work and feeling I was failing miserably. This wasn’t anything unusual, I think everyone felt that that way in my class, and if there are any other art academy alumni here, I’m just gonna assume you do too. But what I was trying to write about then, was this question of ‘time’ in my practice. Because I mostly do film, video and performance work. And I kept returning to this thing of ‘lack’, that the art I gravitate toward is spurned out from a certain source of lack, a state of inaction, of not being allowed to be a full being. And that working with time this way is ‘queer’ in and of itself. But not in the form camp, nor overtly sexual in aesthetic. (Nothing bad about that, if you ask me - on the contrary.) Rather, I was trying to write about something material, quite everyday and unspectacular. In this regard, it would’ve been a good idea - had I had the idea - to use some of the ReStacks’ work as an example. What’s clear from these videos is that trying to talk about something formalistically queer, that time-based art forms can be queer formally, is to talk about a certain feral domestication. And this video trilogy is called ‘Feral Domestic’, after all. One of the things that strikes me whilst watching these shorts is that I can’t make out a logic of the editing, which is exciting, because it means that there is a logic for how things are compiled, I just don’t have access to it. And maybe the editing choices here are ‘feral’, simply put. Because what I can relate the editing to is the texture of the images, the actions being taken and how to place myself in the mire of disparate impulses that pop up throughout these videos. All of that is pretty material stuff.
The Restacks also commissioned a text by author Maggie Nelson. And I think she describes the project of ‘Feral Domestic’ pretty well, in thinking Dani and Sheila have been attempting to fuse their everyday lives with art making in a radical sense, to put their relationships between each other, their child and their friends into this artifice that a lot of us work with. But doing this is a really messy affair, which I think you’ll see as the videos progress and elements of staging become clearer. (The last video is also made post-pandemic, which is worth noting). Nelson posits that the video trilogy confronts the question of whether art has the ability to intensify emotions or keep them away from ourselves. Perhaps it does both, depending on the feeling. But like the nature of the feral, the disorganized, the impulsive and the subcultural, these impressions of the Restacks comes to us in the form of ‘clumps’. I think the image of a ‘clump’ of something is pretty succinct, maybe one way of talking about the mode that these videos have.
I’m also choosing to program these works today, because they resonate at a time that feels strange to me in my own life, where I’m in a relationship that feels committed for these past years, I’m in a daily rhythm that’s become necessary for my health and I have many meaningful friendships. Honestly, this didn’t feel possible for my teenage self, it didn’t cross my mind that I could even live this long, so I don’t have a plan for what to do with a ritualistic, domestic life. How to make that propulsive, somehow.
And that’s what this screening is about ,what the ideas of the ritual, domesticity and the quotidian even mean within queer lives. The Restacks are relevant, not because they show a utopia of ‘queer, feral family’ and reproduction, exactly, but they’re trying to be honest about their attempt at adulthood and community. To be sure, there is a lot of joy in these videos, but nothing has a brilliant simmer of a solution. It’s all living within our reality;of how flesh is constantly negotiated and how the environment surrounding our bodies, especially now, sadly isn’t made for complacency. ”