Projects

Standing Tall

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'They say that in time we will forget. We will become accustomed to the new environment. No. We learn to endure. We do not forget.'

 

An Outrider Anthems community intervention on Reading Golf Course, where 112 numbered trees, and countless smaller others, are to be felled to make way for a profit-motivated housing estate. We gently bound each tree with a tie of white muslin, thus making visible what the developers and Reading Borough Council wish to keep invisible - a mutual community of powerful trees and all their interconnected ecosystems, earmarked for destruction. Our human community, having had our record number of planning protests ignored, stand with the trees. We hope this documentary of our action will be widely shared, and that it will contribute to a changing world in which the sacred spaces and elements of nature become honoured and respected as they once were, and in which the hubris of a capitalist economy finally crumbles under its own insatiable greed. We hope it will inspire others to bear public witness to the non-human victims of human violence, and to stand in love and solidarity with them.

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We have two powerful films to share here. The first is an edited video of the planning meeting (4 mins) at which the scheme was passed. Even as time passes, it still makes painful viewing. The second is the film Standing Tall (8.5 mins) recording our intervention on the site itself, in which we, the community, bound each tree to be felled in a tie of white muslin.

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A composite of the two films can be seen here.

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