Erin Manning

Out of the Clear
2023
Softback
Erin Manning: Out of the Clear
Publisher: Minor Compositions
Dimensions: 18 x 11 cm
Pages: 236
£ 12.00

Out of the Clear begins with the question of the clearing: What operations are at work when land is cleared, or thought is cleared, of all that grows wild? Clearing, the settler-colonial act of defining a territory and producing a border, clears the world of the thickets of all that is already at work. Get rid of the muddle. Privilege productivity. This devaluing operation is taken for granted as the necessary operation for all beginnings. Clear the movement- tendencies before you start dancing. Clear the thought-wanderings before you start writing. Clearing's best accomplice is method. A clear site is one that can be overseen, that can be managed. The resounding image of the clearing in Out of the Clear is the residential school for the forced internment of first nations peoples, the sites always barren, empty of any tangle.

 

About the author (2023)

Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter- pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (2016) and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). 3e is the direction her current artistic research takes - an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.