Why do we still need stories?
Welcome to the website of Marc Wagenbach — writer, researcher, and publisher.
A post-disciplinary practice across literature, performance, artistic research and living archives.
We are no longer who we were
Life is always in motion. Memories shift. Identities remain unfinished. The past reaches us not as a single story but in fragments: traces, voices, images — atmospheres. We tell stories to bring these fragments into relation. To understand who we are. To imagine what we might become. To frame. To select. To take a position. But what forms do stories need in a world that is itself fluid? Stories no longer belong to one medium. They never did. Stories move between literature and performance, bodies and archives, images and dreams, physical spaces and digital worlds.
Welcome to transmedia storytelling!
The Work
The Wild Garden Project began as an attempt to rethink how we perceive, organise and make sense of this complexity. Of our world.
Combining artistic research, cultural theory, literature, performance and gardening practice, it understands the world less as a system to be controlled than as a living environment: layered, entangled and constantly changing.
But if reality is fluid, fragmented and relational, how can we tell its stories?
SEEDS
The idea of Wild Garden Thinking first took root in my long-standing practice in cultural heritage, dance and performance — and in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of wild thinking.
It describes a way of knowing that is associative, sensory and situated: a way of making connections between things that might initially appear unrelated.
Different histories coexist. Some things are cultivated. Something disappears and returns somewhere else.
GROWING
Increasingly, my work moves beyond the idea of storytelling as something confined to a single medium. Stories travel. Meanings shift.
Between literature and performance. Bodies and archives. Images and dreams.
Historical documents and imagined futures. Physical places and digital spaces.
This is where Wild Garden Thinking becomes transmedia storytelling.
HARVEST AND COMPOST
The Wild Garden Project has therefore become a space for exploring how literature, performance, artistic research, archives and images can create new forms of narration in an unstable world.
At its centre is no longer only the question of how we think. It is also the question: Why do we still need stories? And, from there: How do we find forms for a fluid world?
