A few years ago, I interviewed the artmaking team of Dani and Sheilah ReStack, a married couple with children who described their work as based on the concept of “feral domesticity.” It’s a conceptual oxymoron, since the two words suggest opposite sensibilities with respect to the home space. Living in a home together implies domestication, but “feral domesticity” dismantles the civilizing and confining aspects of home life, suggesting a practice that allows wildness and unpredictability inside without attempting to tame it or rob it of its disruptive power. One could compare this with Marilynne Robinson’s classic novel Housekeeping, in the sense that eventually walls no longer demarcate an ideological practice or even a boundary between inside and outside.
I thought about this while rewatching the most recent films of Joshua Gen Solondz, because many of his films take place within what appears to be a domestic space: there are couches, chairs, shelves with plants and knickknacks, all signifying an arena for daily living. Of course, these could be stage sets, like the domestic vaporwave environments in Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines series (2002–2018). But Solondz makes no attempt to draw attention to artifice, and so we can assume for the purposes of discussion that the films are staged in actual home environments. As one watches the films in question—in particular Luna e Santur (2016), (tourism studies) (2019), and his newest film We Don’t Talk Like We Used To—one of the impressions one draws is that Solondz is also turning the quotidian home space into something else. We might call it “savage domesticity.”
Drawing a proper distinction between the feral and the savage would be a job for anthropologists, and perhaps zookeepers. But as I am employing the terms here, let’s say that the feral exists on the very edge of domesticity, circles it, and may eventually be taken inside. The savage, of course, is a
