PAUL CHANEY

2004 - 2012

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During seven years of living and growing at FIELDCLUB the complex ethics of human/non-human relations revealed themselves in fine detail.

 

FIELDCLUB was an opportunity for a post-modern human (the artist) to live in a geographically bound food web. As the project progressed over the years and seasons the non-domesticated non-human became more numerous and more visible to the human protagonist.

 

The principles of the Hutchinsonian niche system were applied to map the interactions between the human and non-domesticated non-human co-inhabitants of the site. In this mapping, the human was considered as just another species in the food web. The work became a study of proximity which revealed a set of paradoxes:

 

1) The less distance there is between the site of human production and the site of human consumption, the more the true nature of the relationship between the human and the non-domesticated non-human becomes apparent.

 

2) Any agricultural system (linear, regenerative, chemical or organic) categorically denies 'living room' to the non-domesticated non-human in order to provide for the human.

 

3) The more living room given to the non-domesticated non-human through the practice of 'low-impact' farming, the larger their numbers and more complex their nexi become, leading to an overall increase of death resulting from any human intervention on the land.

 

To take an ‘improved’ silage pasture and convert it to a wildflower meadow on a traditional cutting regime (such as took place at FIELDCLUB) means there will be more homes and livelihoods for many more mice, and therefore more foxes, owls, and kestrels.  When the lush, biodiverse, organic and waist high grass is cut close to the ground at haymaking time, those mice will be killed by the swinging scythe blade and eaten by circling buzzards by day and prowling foxes by night where their bodies lay.

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Nature truly does abhor a vacuum. A newly ploughed 'conventional' field forgotten for fifteen years would already be on its way to becoming a young woodland. Thanks to the jay burying acorns and the blackbirds seeding blackberry scrub wherever they fly.

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Ploughing is a deliberately repeated act to maintain the land as a substrate for human production – reenforcing the legacy of the forest clearances that sterilised the biota many hundreds of years before.

 

At FIELDCLUB the food-production system was low-till. The non-domesticated non-human thrived, and subsequently died by zero-carbon human hand. The incidences of non-domesticated non-human death caused by this attempt to go 'deeper green' were documented in photo and film, before the bodies buried in a dedicated and maintained graveyard.

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Humans are exceptionalists. Underlying virtually all relationships between humans and non-domesticated non-humans here is a problematic question of 'tierischer lebensraum'. But this is something you don't bump into at the supermarket.