Paul Chaney – Sustainable Necessities and Yet Darker Ecologies
Audio playlist (5 tracks)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Slides
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Sustainable Necessities and Yet Darker Ecologies
Abstract: This presentation describes FIELDCLUB – a small agricultural site in Cornwall. Here Chaney lived off-grid in a hand built cabin between 2004 and 2012 while undertaking his own food production and relying on minimal outside resources. During this project Chaney devised speculative methodologies for quantification, analysis, and design; using his practice as a tool to interrogate the relations between an individual human, a limited site, and the site’s non-human inhabitants. The experiment grew into an exploration of dark ecologies and tried to consider the ironies and ethical complexities embodied within a post-modern attempt to ‘get back to nature’, while revealing wider implications for the paradigms of human endeavour, technological progress, and sustainability.
Bio: Paul Chaney is a freelance artist whose work is articulated through a mix of installation, participatory and durational art practices. He has worked with Urbanomic, Tate St Ives, Serpentine Gallery, The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW), Divus (Prague, Czech Republic) and Izolyatsia (Donetsk, Ukraine). In 2015 he was awarded the Arts Foundation runner up prize, and nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Prize.