The second annual “Perceptual Ferment” gathering took place on the 3E land from September 26 to October 1. More than twenty collaborators of the 3E network from ten countries participated on site, with another dozen participating remotely for the reading sessions. The proposition for the event was to work together collectively to further develop the concept of “giving the land back to itself.” This is a concept we have been working on to serve as a guide as the 3E land base expands (more on this in a later post) and we move toward formal arrangements to take the land permanently out of the property market. The land will be preserved in perpetuity with a mission to support experimental practices of collaborative research and learning that are respectful of neurodiversity and foster ecological engagement. The simplest way to summarize the concept of giving the land back to itself is with a simple reversal: from the land belonging to us, to us belonging to the land.
Because the main orientation of the event was to work together on this concept and the social and political issues related to it, each day pivoted on a reading group. We read work from: anarchist anthropologist David Graeber on the links between slavery and the origin of the concept of private property, and between private property and the modern concept of freedom; Karl Marx on the clearing of the land of indigenous populations and the violent expropriation of communal land as central to “the primitive accumulation of capital” (the transformation of commonly held resources into private property as a founding gesture of the modern market economy); Glen Coulthard on the Dene struggle for self-determination, and on the tensions between recognized tribal governments and traditional indigenous notions of the land and sovereignty; and Jared Sexton on the tensions between the Black radical tradition and movements for indigenous sovereignty, contrasting the differing positions of African-descended and indigenous peoples with respect to colonialism and pointing out the complications of the notions of indigeneity and land-based sovereignty for descendants of slaves who were forged as a people by the severance of their ties to ancestral lands through the Middle Passage.
As with all 3E events, the bulk of the activities were self-organizing through “pop-up” propositions, which everyone was invited to initiate. The propositions ranged from exposing already used film stock to the elements (including fermentation) to trying out a certain permaculture technique for building soil (hügelkultur) to practices of artfully attuning to the forest ecology. Images and ideas culled from the readings and propositions were transferred to the 3E “anarchive” – https://fuit.es/ (enter token “murmurations,” select 3E, and explore the “portals” leading to alternate 3E universes).
