Richard Saltoun Gallery, London UK - May 31-June 22 - https://www.richardsaltoun.com/exhibitions/125-erin-manning-100-acres/

The trees are a concern. We invite him in to cull. The solar panels are shaded by the tallest ones. Decisions have to be made. We can’t cut them all down. How much energy is enough?

Sustainable: capable of being endured; continuing to exist.

The solar panels are really in the wrong place. More money should go into raising them, into pushing them above the tree tops. Strange, this stand-off with the forest, caught up with the desire to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, to not need the generator on those cloudy days where the sun just can’t get through.

He comes and we stand on the edge of the cliff and look out at the river. Which trees should fall? He points at trees. We nod. Or change our mind. No, not that birch, it’s so beautiful. There is no rational standpoint. A bit of shade brought on by this one is not so bad, is it? But that one, yes, that one should go. Down with the conifers!

I go down to where he is. He doesn’t talk much. Instead, he holds his hands in front of his eyes, mimicking taking a photograph. Yes, he says.

There’s a path here, I say. Can we move the fallen trees off the path? I love the moss. He looks down. Yes, he says, we will make sure the path remains. The dog runs around us, excited by the sound of the chainsaw.

Manning Out of the Clear 2022

100 Acres is composed of two twenty-five yard cuts of monkscloth that are sewn, embroidered, knotted and tufted. In a refusal of distantism - the belief that the world is given to us in the establishing shot of overview - the work recalls the lived encounter of the forest as lived through the 3Ecologies Project. A project that aims to engage in parapedagogies of resistance, 3E is concerned with giving land back to itself by purchasing it and taking it out of the property market. It is also interested in fostering techniques for other ways of living and learning. The forest in the work is a speculative garden, a incitement for other ways of touching existence. Deeply engaged with the ProTactile movement, it asks how else the world calls us to sense.

100 Acres continues the work of crafting relational fields that compose with movement-moving. This more-than human engagement with the textures of existence aims to generate choreographies of encounter. In a lineage with past work - most of which is textural in form and force - an ethos of participation is proposed that refuses to be delimited to the shape the art takes. For this work, this includes a protocol for negotiation and minor repair that invites the audience to participate in the process of giving the forest back to itself. The work’s fragile weave is revealed in the cut.

Protocol - 100 Acres

1. Negotiate a cut with the artist for extraction (4 ft x 5 ft, 2000£)

2. Coordinate a minor repair of the incision

3. Resituate the piece in a new milieu

All funds will go toward the purchase of additional land for the 3Ecologies Project (3ecologies.org). Purchased land will be taken out of the property market and placed in collective stewardship in perpetuity.

PROJECT

Give the land back to itself. 

 THE 3 ECOLOGIES

Of subjectivity (in its nascent state)

Of the social (in a mutant state)

Of the environment (at the point it can be reinvented)