The cultures and concepts that Manning refers to in our conversation centre on the inventive possibilities that emerge when land is freed from being a commodity. In this case, Manning and Massumi have provided 3e with ninety of the one hundred acres of land they bought near St-Anne-du-Lac, a village on the northern edge of Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s Laurentides region. The project, conceived as \u201can open milieu of relation,\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See \u201cLand-Based Activities,\u201d 3ecologies (website), accessed November 20, 2023, accessible online.<\/span> currently comprises a solar-powered house, a sugar shack, a cabin, and an old-growth maple forest, a cold-climate greenhouse and to be completely off-grid. One of 3e\u2019s goals is to buy plots of land to protect them from real estate development, and to offer alter-economic accommodations. Currently, The 3ecologies Project is working with the Aqueduct Foundation, a Canadian public charitable foundation that specifically facilitates gifts of complex property. The plan is to make ninety acres of 3e\u2019s project into a kind of commons, where the land will be protected and its custodians will be guided by a mandate worked out by the people who are currently tending to it. Manning isn\u2019t approaching the project idealistically or romantically, but she is optimistic that buying land to turn it into a commons will play a part in unsorting the culture of private property. \u201cThe idea,\u201d she says, \u201cwas that 3e would always be a place where you didn\u2019t have to worry about property, so you could live there without ever having to buy land.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The assemblage, as three transversal ecologies (the social, the environmental, and the conceptual) envisions conditions for people to be able to freely rethink anarchic living in situ<\/em>. The hope is to destabilize neurotypical and neoliberal models of living and the economic aspects of land stewardship and cultivation in relation to property ownership. (Most often it has been artists, racialized, and neurodiverse people who have stayed at 3e.) The larger question centres on how to give land back to itself by changing human relations with it\u200a\u2014\u200aan active politics of refusal, following the arguments of scholars Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their book The<\/em> Undercommons <\/em>(2013).6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study<\/em> (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).<\/span> Understanding 3e\u2019s land-based project is neither easy or straightforward, nor are Manning\u2019s answers to my questions about it. To unpack her ideas I situate the project within critiques of settler occupations and how they intertwine with private property, using Nicholas Mirzoeff\u2019s critiques of whiteness in White Sight<\/em> (2023)7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).<\/span> and Sara Ahmed\u2019s arguments on race as a violent sorting system.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - See Sara Ahmed, \u201cOut of Sorts,\u201d feministkilljoys<\/em> (blog), October 15, 2014, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Manning\u2019s first book, Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada <\/em>(2003),9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Erin Manning, Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada <\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).<\/span> dealt with the question of what it means to be at home, and what it means to have a mortgaged existence. As we talked on her balcony, it became clear that \u201cowning land\u201d is in some ways impossible to truly think. It\u2019s only possible when land operates as the commodity par excellence<\/em>. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the establishment of property can be understood as an act of transgression and thievery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As such, engaging in the buying and selling of land serves to legitimize the unlawfulness of private property. These acts of thievery swell Canada\u2019s history and its present, as Canadian real estate was responsible for almost half of the country\u2019s GDP in 2022.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Mirzoeff writes that \u201creal estate\u201d is what, \u201cUS English calls the militarized possession of calculable space\u200a\u2014\u200ameaning white reality.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Nicholas Mirzoeff, \u201cTo Strike In the Dark,\u201d The Week in White Sight <\/em>(blog), November 13, 2023, accessible online.<\/span> Indeed, our broader understanding of nature, and in turn land, is based on the genocidal expansion of land acquisition by imperial and white settler forces that reframed agriculture and disregarded Indigenous cultures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In theory and practice, Manning sees this understanding as a result of \u201cclearing,\u201d a polymorphous term that she identifies as a system of violence.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - See Erin Manning, Out of the Clear<\/em> (New York: Minor Compositions, 2023).<\/span> Clearing requires a capitalist sorting, which Ahmed conceptualizes as a violent system, similar to race and gender.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Ahmed, \u201cOut of Sorts.\u201d<\/span> Large-scale agriculture has a sorting system that is based on efficiency and profit under capitalism, determining what is effectual and what is useless. Compare this to permaculture, which resists the homogeneity of scaling up or of any systems that try to settle it into an anthropocentric order. Everyone who lives or comes to stay at St-Anne-du-Lac learns this through the hard and enduring work of being stewards of the land, trying to undo the consequences of settler colonialism. The parcelling of land and clearcutting of forests enabled settler ownership by violently removing the traces of relation with the people who inhabited it. The land is cleared to be used up for capital. Aware of this history, Manning, herself a white settler, tells me, \u201cThere is no thinking about private property without contending with whiteness.\u201d Settler colonialism and climate destruction are interconnected, and 3e is a practice of figuring a way around it, for there is no way out, as the paradoxes of the project illustrate. But there is the power of refusal: a refusal of neoprimitivism and moralist imaginaries of ecological ways of being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back-to-the-land movements often hinge on utopian wilderness environmentalism based on urban and Eurocentric ecological hubris: the idea that people can conquer land in the wild seemingly means that they care about the land. Manning\u2019s adamant refusal of that practice stems from its binary positioning of the urban dweller as superior, as someone who needs to \u201cgo back\u201d to an agrarian practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEveryday acts of resurgence sound romantic, but they are not,\u201d writes Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe scholar, writer, and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. \u201cPut aside visions of \u2018back to the land,\u2019\u201d she continues, \u201cand just think land<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200asome of it is wild, some of it is urban, a lot of it is ecologically devastated.\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 195; emphasis added.<\/span> Following Simpson, Manning tells me, \u201cOne reason it\u2019s not a back-to-the-land project is that it would be a real shame if any of these things that we\u2019re doing there didn\u2019t move into the urban context.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The heritage and organization of whiteness is stealing land for occupation and resource extraction\u200a\u2014\u200awhiteness as property. After all, much of Canada is unceded territory, and Indigenous people have very few land rights compared to settlers; for example, First Nations people who live on a reserve cannot legally own property. Recognizing this, Manning reminds us that The 3ecologies Project is always going to be colonial in its history because it is situated on land with a long indigenous history. That isn\u2019t an excuse, but an acknowledgment of the many paradoxes of making another world visible and livable. No one who lives on the ninety-acre commons at 3e can ever own the property; however, they never have to pay for it either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the one hand, Manning recognizes that she and Massumi must have a relationship with property that is economic, so that others do not have to. That is, people can make 3e their home by living there or building a small dwelling to accommodate their needs without paying anything for the land, so that they can put their energies toward things other than housing, which, for many in precarity, can be totalizing. However, they cannot clear any of the old-growth maple forest, and they cannot pass it down to their children or anyone else, unless those others want to actively participate in the land\u2019s<\/em> mandate. The key concern of the mandate will be to not destroy the land. Whatever is built or cultivated belongs to the land. For Manning, the land is \u201ca tract of the earth that can be lived on, practised on, not cut down for real estate, forever.\u201d Recently, this involved a sauna, a vegetable garden, several goats, and an upcoming exhibition. People who stay at 3e are not obliged to do any of the work, but, given the environment and the kind of people who gravitate toward anarchic living, guests generally want to contribute to the alter-economy as well as to the local economy; the doing brings joy. To suggest that all labour be tied to monetary value, or to a quid pro quo, perpetuates the transactional nature of capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other hand, this does raise issues of ownership and economy. Manning and Massumi are using their privileges as professionals with financial means, as well as a Patreon monetization platform intended for benefactors interested in making non-conditional contributions, to remove ninety acres from the market to protect it from deforestation, mining, and real estate development. What conditions precluded them from placing the entire hundred acres under a mandate and still live there? At some level, even as a commons, the ninety acres must belong to someone or some entity? Can the land ever belong to itself, or resist commodification, within contemporary culture? I circle around these questions, reproducing Manning\u2019s notion that \u201cprivate property has become the language because it\u2019s the language that we speak.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One way to give land back to itself is to take it out of the realm of private property, \u201ctaking those [private property\/keep off] signs off,\u201d Manning notes. \u201cExcept you can\u2019t quite take the signs off because now you need new signs, like non-private property, enter, but don\u2019t destroy, or whatever.\u201d She admits that learning this is an ongoing practice, and that 3e is a way to practise activating and making visible land-based relations. For poet and philosopher \u00c9douard Glissant, relation evokes \u201cthe conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures.\u201d14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - \u00c9douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation<\/em>, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 58.<\/span> One needs private property to unprivate <\/em>it, as Manning and Massumi do: they own their house and their capital of ten acres of the one hundred in St-Anne-du-Lac, which supports the project, and which itself runs at an economic deficit but accrues non-transactional value. Glissant\u2019s theory of relation allows Manning and Massumi to rethink and radicalize the economic aspects of land stewardship, the context that many small agricultural producers in Qu\u00e9bec rent rather than own the land that they cultivate, the dense and difficult questions about what property is, who has access to it, and the processes of dispossession that need to be in place for it to emerge in the first place. These questions undergird 3e\u2019s \u201calter-economic system\u201d as it is enacted in St-Anne-du-Lac with the local community, as well as their goal of \u201cgiving land back to itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One approach to giving land back to itself is to refuse capitalist scarcity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Manning explains, \u201cScarcity is capitalism\u2019s way of enforcing private property: of thought, of movement, of architecture, and so on.\u201d She resists this violent sorting system, and questions what sharing means in our culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Projects like these need to run in parallel with Land Back movements that also resist the colonial culture of sorting land. Many Canadian property owners have a hard time grasping the idea of Land Back because they think of it as an attack on or a threat to what they own. However, only eleven percent of Canada\u2019s land is privately owned, so when we talk about Land Back, we are indirectly questioning the concept of Crown land, and championing the return of \u201cCrown land\u201d stewardship to Indigenous populations. What Manning and Massumi are doing is reconceiving ways of approaching the land that don\u2019t centre on investing in real estate and exploiting resources in the name of capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Polish writer, artist, and professor living in Montr\u00e9al, Magdalena Olszanowski received her PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University, where she is now part-time faculty. She also teaches at Dawson College. Her work is concerned with censorship, environmental justice, the maternal, feminist art, and the early web.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Erin-Manning\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Olszanowski_Erin-Manning_02-EXTRA.jpg\")
The 3ecologies Project<\/em>, Sainte-Anne-du-Lac, 2020-2023.
Photos: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Olszanowski_Erin-Manning_05-EXTRA.jpg\")
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![\"Erin-Manning\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Olszanowski_Erin-Manning_01.jpg\")
The 3ecologies Project<\/em>, Sainte-Anne-du-Lac, 2020-2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Erin-Manning\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Olszanowski_Erin-Manning_04-EXTRA.jpg\")
The 3ecologies Project<\/em>, Sainte-Anne-du-Lac, 2020-2023.
Photos: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Erin-Manning\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_Olszanowski_Erin-Manning_03-EXTRA.jpg\")
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