The concept of Rewilding emerges in the early 1990s preservation discussions and is first introduced by the environmentalist Dave Foreman. He uses the term to talk about wilderness restoration of native species and processes. 

The term is still predominantly used in an environmental context and has multiple connotations that usually share a long term aim of restoring and maintaining wilderness while reducing the past, present, or future impact of humans on nature. The process implies returning “non-wild” cultivated areas back to a “wild” natural state. (In a sense reversing the anthropocene) 

As we are unpacking the term Rewilding we are conscious of the problematics surrounding a romanticized ideology of the “wild” as it is often fetishized from a historical, eurocentric perspective. It seemingly implies a rivalry of wilderness vers. culture, re-rooting culture as progress and nature as an idealized, permanent yet terminated state that is somehow positioned in the past or the exotic faraway. However, we are very interested in the possibilities of the term as it allows the implication that humans have a responsibility to other human or non-human species to restore self-regulating and self-sustaining ecological communities. It is unimaginable to think rewilding without considering the social, cultural, psychological, economic, and political dimensions of its process. Repositioning humans as a part of nature and the wild, instead of its conquerer that dominate its surroundings in to submission, to be bend to the will of progress. 

We are therefore thinking with the term as a possibility to question art institutional practices, to deconstruct the very foundation of “culture” as a man made superior model, and to acknowledge the importance of holistic natural systems as an alternative form to structure the institution. Rewilding for us means understanding our responsibilities, our relationship with nature, and other peoples as well as getting insight that can inform adaptive management and sustainable development of artistic projects.