Activities Updates

July 2025

Mid-summer is almost upon us already, as we look back on a busy spring. Starting in March, we tried out a new format for 3E activities. Danish 3E participant Mie Natius organized a rolling residency that lasted three months, through maple syrup season and the Plant Movement event into planting (and black fly!) season. Participants came and went, staying for periods from a few days to several weeks. Mie did a fantastic job of organizing the house, orienting arrivals, and helping orchestrate activities. In total, nearly 30 participants rolled through, making for a very animated season, with many new connections made. Generous contributions from participants, the largest sourced from grants, supported the guest house financially through this period, enabling us to remove it for the duration of the residency from the short-term rental market that is its usual means of sustenance. The maple season was a fruitful one. We produced 265 liters of some of the highest quality syrup we’ve made…

June 2025

The Quebec government has submitted to the National Assembly a legislative proposal that will decimate Quebec’s public forests, which cover 92% of the province, or an area of 761,000 sq. km. (one and a half times the size of France). The bill, called Law 97, hands almost complete control over the forests to the lumber industry, which has overexploited the forests for decades, leading to the near eradication of old growth forest and the near extinction of the woodland caribou. To get a sense of how extreme the measure is, check out the list of some its provisions here…

May 2025

The 3E land and its reawakening spring flora hosted an event that ran from May 17–22, 2025. Fifteen people came together on-site, periodically joined by a larger number online, around the questions raised by plant movement. The impetus for the event was seeded by the cinematic and theoretical work of filmmaker and 3E participant Oana Suteu Khintirian, in dialogue the burgeoning field of plant philosophy around issues such as agency, intelligence, intentionality, and the distinction between the plant and the animal. Following our usual 3E approach, the event combined philosophical readings with on-site activities growing out of emergent “pop-up propositions” launched by participants during the event…

March 2025

Snaking up and around throughout the gallery, the textile artwork “100 Acres” creates a topology with rhythmic movements winding across the patterns that were conceived as non-representational renderings (transductions) of movements across the 3E land in a refusal of distantism (the belief that the world is given to us in the establishing shot of overview). There was protocol: at the end of the exhibition period, people were invited to cut a piece (5 feet by 5 feet) out of the work in return for a 2000-pound contribution to a land fund to enlarge the amount of land under protection as part of 3E: land that, at the time of this writing, is being unsettled, taken out of the property market and given back to itself…

November 2024

In the second week of November, as autumn yielded to the coming winter, 3E held a 3-day gathering on money and alter-economies. The weekend was planned as an intensive study session around a selection of four texts. In addition to a chapter on gift economies by David Graeber and an essay on racial capitalism by Jodi Melamed, 15 in-person and 30 online participants read and discussed texts coming out of the SenseLab’s years-long experiments with alter-economies. The aim was to restart discussions on decentralized finance, alternative notions of value, and collective decision-making related to these as 3E moves across a threshold into a new phase…

October 2024

At the end of September over a ten-day period, 3E hosted around 30 collaborators for a rolling event called “Perceptual Ferment.” The event was planned using techniques for self-organizing gleaned from our experiences with SenseLab. There was an emergent agenda composed on the fly by “pop-up propositions” coming from participants…

July 2024

Last year the 3E maple season was disastrous – the worst in anyone’s memory due to a sudden weather shift from too-cold to too-hot. The 2024 maple syrup season was the opposite, the most abundant anyone could remember. We produced a healthy harvest of 93 gallons of high-quality syrup. We could have kept going for two or three more weeks, but decided to stop, partially out of exhaustion (the season started early, at a time when fewer collaborators were available to come up and help) but also because we felt we were reaching the limit of how much we could distribute in the coming months. This year we tried something new…

December 2023

3E’s Parapedagogical Techniques Fold Back Into the University in the form of a radically non-neurotypical PhD and PhD defence

Erin Manning recounts: The world shifted a bit on its axis today. We felt it when Mayra Morales spoke at the end of Xece Khadija Baker’s doctoral defence. There are many ways we could tell the story of the university’s endgame, and what it means to move through it (and of course when I say university, I do mean world)…

November 2023

video by Mayra Morales

September 2023

The ceramics group, led by Linda Swanson, returned to 3E at the end of August to continue their on-site experimentations in local clay and mineral sourcing and on-site ceramics firing. This time, firing was done using the simplest and oldest method, in a fire-pit. Plans are ongoing toward the future construction on 3E land of a newly designed ecological kiln that uses a fraction of the wood required by a traditional wood-burning kilns…

July 2023

The farm of one of our local collaborators, Rémi Roy, has become something like a farm extension of the 3E forest land. Located on the opposite end of Ste-Anne-du-Lac from the 3E land, it has been a working subsistence farm for generations. A work exchange arrangement has evolved between Rémi and 3E. Rémi has been using his lumberjack and jack-of-all-trade skills to help with 3E land improvements and maintenance, sometimes for pay but often as part of an informal labor exchange where 3E collaborators help out on his farm, with a share of the production going to 3E. This has included, among other things, planting 400 tomato plants of 17 different varieties, a variety vegetables for canning and pickling, fruit and flowers for fermentation into vinegars, a medicinal herb garden for the preparation of herbal tinctures, and now the arrival of two young milk goats for experimenting with cheese making…

May 2023

“Sugaring off,” or the maple syrup production season, is a ritual of the transition from the northern winter to spring. At 3E, it is a time of gathering around the wood-burning furnace where 3E collaborators from Montreal and beyond rub shoulders with local collaborators and learn from their deep knowledge of the forest ecology and land-based practices. This April, more than 20 collaborators participated in the laborious process of boiling down the maple sap to a 1/40th concentration using traditional artisanal methods, and then bottling it for distribution. It proved to be a challenging season. We were confronted directly with the effects of climate change: for the first time ever, the transitional weather conditions necessary for the sap to run didn’t really eventuate. Early in the spring, the temperature went directly from too cold to too hot…

by Erin Manning
Published: March 2023

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…

December 2022

The Dramaturgical Ecologies, a research group from Concordia University headed by Angelique Wilkie, returned to 3E for a 4-day residency on “para-ontological” conceptions of Blackness. Seventeen participants gathered around informal discussions, a reading group on the work of African-American scholar Nahum Chandler, and an afternoon discussion between Erin Manning and Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe…

December 2022

In late September, 3E hosted 20 participants for a residency entitled “Redolence and Resonance.” The 3-day workshop was organized around the work of Mathew Arthur on “smellworlds”: cultural and experiential mappings of scent. Mathew supplements his studies with scent-based practices, such as the production of perfumes and essential oils through distillation as well as various forms of fermentation…

July 2022

The 3E Project’s first summer residency was held the first week of July 2022. The week’s project revolved around the work of three accomplished Montreal-based mixed-media artists who come from cultural traditions whose cooking practices traditionally involve the construction and use of outdoor ovens made of earth and clay: Shaya Ishaq (Ghanaian-Canadian), Ifeoma Anyaeji (Nigerian), and Khadija Baker (Kurdish Syrian)…

July 2022

In the second week of July, 3E hosted a residency for the Dramaturgical Ecologies research group from Concordia University, Montreal. Dramaturgical Ecologies is a multidisciplinary research-creation group headed by Angélique Wilkie (Dance, Concordia University). Its work centers on “relating agency to concepts such as blackness, dramaturgy, gesture, ecology, and embodiment”…

June 2022

We have been using this year’s maple production as a fund-raising tool, taking contributions in return for syrup. Our donations have just surpassed our expenses for the season. (Expenses were $2952 and we just surpassed $3000 in returns). Everything we bring in from now on will be extra operating expenses for other activities. 

This comes just as we are moving into two back-to-back residencies: Fire! (traditional clay oven and kiln construction on site) and a week of thinking-together with Angélique Wilkie’s Dramaturgical Ecologies project…

May 2022

Year two of sugaring off has come and gone, and 95 gallons of syrup later, we are also almost untapped! The process is demanding and beautiful. It begins when the weather goes above 0 during the day but stays below 0 at night. This happened late this year – the very last days of March were the beginning and then when we stopped the third week of April we could have gone on for a couple of weeks more (there was snow on the ground until two weeks ago). Now it’s been around 30 degrees for the past few days – a crazy weather shift! …

November 2021

In early October, with covid precautions in force, the first organized gathering took place since the beginning of the pandemic. 21 3E collaborators came together on the 3E land in the Upper Laurentians (Québec) for 3 days. The event revolved around an intensive, collective reading of a generative philosophical text touching on concepts of land, territory, earth, nature-culture, and the relation between the city and the country…

July 2023

A new email-based reading group on schizoanalysis is starting. Schizoanalysis, the practice of creating conditions for a life resplendent with neurodiversity, is explored here…

January 2020

For all of those who need to learn from children how to play.

In January we started Playcare, a weekly gathering of any children who want to come and play, and teach us study on their own terms. Orientations include research on a winter greenhouse and a cricket farm…

December 2019

The reading acts as lure. We gather around it, committed to the text’s capacity not so much to pin down meaning as for meaning to diffuse, rippling the room with hints of thoughts to come. Their imperceptible sway, already felt, colours the room in advance of their taking form. The text is thinking itself out, becoming environmental. It is out-thinking itself, becoming extra-text, more ambiance than encapsulated content…

October 2019

In this video, Jonas Fritsch and Mogens Jacobsen of the IT University of Copenhagen describe their interactive sculpture that responds to movement and other changing parameters in the surrounding environment, making these shifts in the relational field visible in its own movement. This research is part of ongoing research for the 3E Process Seed Bank investigating ways of registering qualitative changes in complex interactions. This concept of the “affect-o-meter” is a key element of the 3E’s speculative project of a qualitative economy…

August 2019

In-depth collective reading of philosophy has been at the heart of SenseLab activities since its inception, and is equally central to the 3Ecologies Project. A main reading group has been continuously active for 16 years, and has generated numerous spin-off groups, as well as experimental forms of group reading practice. This ongoing concept-work enters into synergy with practices in registers other than language to form the “research-creation” matrix explored by 3E. In this video, Andrew Murphie and Lone Bertelsen discuss the ethos of “hypothetical sympathy” guiding the collective reading and describe the most widely used experimental technique, which we call “conceptual speed-dating”…

July 2019

Andrew Goodman and Erin Manning present their relational quilt proposition for seeding collective dreaming, inspired by a short story by Ursula LeGuin. Between April and December 2019, the three quilts will travel from sleeper to sleeper across SenseLab network following the series of “Minor Movements” events that will form the transition to the 3Ecologies Project. The data streams from the quilts will register emergent qualities of relation, of the kind that will be central to the value system of the 3E alter-economy…

May 2019

An impasse occurs. Suddenly words seem incapable of attending to the contours of a project. The  urgency that brought a project into activation is weighed down by a fear of not being capable of articulating its shifting stakes. How to diagram its force back into existence? …

April 2019

Schizosomatics is a speculative-pragmatic study on modes of experience through the schizz, cut or interval. If somatics is considered a plane of affective swarming of experience that includes the body but is not limited to it, then the multiplicity of schizzes are what (re)compose experience of the plane, allowing it to become, diagrammatically…