It is under a silky plaid and in front of a crackling stove that we give you some news of our collective adventure!
It’s cold, the fields are white, but the sky is blue and the peach trees had time to bloom before the frost! This is a good omen for a year that promises in many ways to be an opportunity, a renewal.
Indeed, a little air of maturity is creeping over Eotopia…
This year we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project and the 7th anniversary of our installation in Saône-et-Loire. Since then, so many things have happened, so many roads have crossed… and uncrossed. Like so many other collective projects, Eotopia has seen its share of arrivals and departures and what was at the beginning has almost nothing to do with what is today. This is undoubtedly a characteristic of this type of adventure and we realize that each departure is not a rupture, but a promise.
On this beautiful spring day, Eotopia is more than ever a collective adventure, cultivated by hundreds of hands and thought by hundreds of minds, and if the result sometimes seems a bit chaotic, it remains deeply alive. We are an organism in constant evolution.
As it should be, the winter passed peacefully by the stove, but the inhabitants were not idle. Running a house, a place, a project, requires a daily involvement, whether it is in the care of the buildings, the organization of the collective or the management of future visiting periods.
Thus, we have the great pleasure to have elaborated a binder which is already an essential tool for the implementation of a real self-management. Everything is explained, in great detail, for the visits, the inhabitants and the residents, the three statuses in force at our place.
The basic idea is on the one hand to make visible all that is done and must be done for such a project to work and evolve and on the other hand to allow all the people coming to the place to make a place for themselves and participate in the common effort.
But to see it… you will have to come and visit us!
As far as events are concerned, we have already published our dates and the year has already started well with a first period of festive visits.
It started with Ada’s 8th birthday celebration which set the tone. To celebrate spring, we directed our efforts to the garden which is slowly coming back to life and adapting to the new hands that are shaping it. After a year of non-voluntary fallow, it has taking back its place in the collective. The visits being very motivated, they went on with the straw soil, despite the temperatures!
We are renovating the greenhouse to use it as soon as possible. We want avocados, lemons and peppers! In parallel, this week was a great opportunity to discover new things with workshops proposed by the visitors as well as by the inhabitants, a wild game of “six qui prend” or werewolf, discovery of wild plants, yoga classes, initiation to Qoya or theatrical activities.
As always, these periods of visitation are a breath of fresh air that nourish the collective and help us move forward. We welcome back visitors in April (sold out!) to continue to beautify the garden and the space, and we will end the month with our open doors (28 to 30th of april)
In May, we’re doing what we like with the mass stove ! If you want to come, hurry, it fills up fast!
June will be dedicated to introspection with our third Inner Expression.
Café Jolivert has had a quiet winter, almost in hibernation, but spring is bringing back the desire to get out and we have lots of events coming up. Stay tuned to the project’s instagram page.
We receive a lot of requests and do our best to answer them. It’s a pleasure to see that there is still a lot of interest in this type of initiative, we need support, all of us, here and elsewhere to gain resilience and develop different ways of living. We are still far from self-sufficiency, whether it be in energy or food, but we are undoubtedly progressing on the path of human ecology.
We look forward to meeting you here and/or elsewhere,
The eotopian family
