about

This is an ongoing audio-visual research of militant anthropology. Based in Europe, it aims to promote grassroots land struggles by making known the stories of people that flourish in spaces of resistance to transform capitalist market structures. The title is Common Grounds to reawaken in our collective imaginary the idea that land belongs to everyone who inhabits it.

While land inequality is rising, people who want to return to the land with regenerative aims - for biodiversity, community, and an agroecological food transition - are hindered by lack of capital and find themselves locked out by private property gatekeeping. But there are plenty of ways to break those gates and reclaim our land.

Common Grounds began in 2022 as the final project for a master's degree in "Political Ecology, Degrowth and Environmental Justice" given at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (Spain). Emma Marzi, aspiring farmer and amateur filmmaker, had the idea to meet people who found ways to contest or subvert private property of land. She was quickly joined by Emilie de Bassompierre, who shares her enthusiasm for rethinking rurality and reclaiming land.

Envisioning deep transformations of capitalist society meant for us to look at the roots of the structural inequalities and lock-ins of our current political economy. Dispossessing people of their means of reproduction, privatising key resources and creating artificial scarcity are the engines of a system which is always pushing against the limits of human and non-human life to appropriate more of their wealth.

In contrast, the objective of land sovereignty motivates us because it recenters abundance and commoning. It is about fighting for the right to live in thriving environments and eat healthy food, striving for more autonomy and collectivity in decisions about how we use and treat the land that we belong to, inhabiting places in a mutually respectful and joyful way... It is also one way to improve global environmental justice. With this project, we want to contribute to an emerging movement which is proposing alternatives to capitalism rooted in their local realities.

A bit more background...

The larger ecosystem behind Common Grounds involves a group of 8 friends committed to making art for social change, who created a collective (@ColectivoGrietas) based in Barcelona.

Together we realised an exhibition, called desde las grietas, rebeldes, on the topic of socio-eco-emotional transformations. Each of us investigated different potential sites of transformation - of which access to land, but also the right to the city, productivity culture, the disciplining of the body, and the condition and feeling of precarity - and we show the audience how they are interconnected in a mycelial way. We want to approach transformations not only as the necessary response to the cracks in our system but also as exciting possibilities, much how life mutates and produces beautiful diversity. The exhibition is moving from place to place, you can follow the instagram of Colectivo Grietas to know upcoming dates.

On its own, Common Grounds is also shared in festivals, cultural events, classrooms, and more as we travel Europe. We share dates and places on our twitter account (@commongrounds).