Taking advantage of a lull in the maple syrup production caused by unseasonably warm weather to catch up on an activity report…
First, a reminder: we limit our posts on Patreon to occasional updates to avoid burdening your in box. More frequent communications and activity organizing occur on our Basecamp distance collaboration platform, and daily communication on our Slack channel. If you’re interested in being closer in touch, just write us as 3ecologiesinstitute@gmail.com and we will add you to Basecamp if you’re not already on it. If you have an appetite for even more, the Slack channel is also an option. A full report on our very eventful maple season will come soon.
In January, we had a writing retreat at the 3E collective house. Seventeen postgraduate students and artists gathered. Days were spent writing individually and refuelling in the forest environment. Each night, volunteers shared a “knot” – a conceptual problematic or writing-practice issue they were working through. The knot was explored constructively by the group, in an exploratory spirit that was not oriented toward finding a solution so much as opening new avenues. Writing-practice issues that came up included the politics of citation practice, balancing the demands of academic writing with more creative language potentials, and ways of entering into writing and pacing it (following from the collective elaboration of a concept of “relational pacing” that has been ongoing through a reading group and Basecamp discussions). The main conceptual issue that came up had to do with indigineity and the ambivalences of a land-based project on dispossessed indigenous territory whose original seasonal inhabitants (the Weskarini) were so thoroughly colonized and forcibly scattered that they no longer exist as an organized group, as far as we can ascertain. The project’s way of responding to the issue of settler colonialism has been to develop a notion of “giving the land back to itself” in the form of an ecological commons that is permanently withdrawn from the real estate market and from development and dedicated to collective learning. We should have developments to share on this front in the next 9 months. The discussion prompted us to do another round of research on the Weskarini, which has yielded more details and new leads on a largely lost history.
