The research is situated within the ‘ecovillage’ of Charlotendals Gard owned by the Hagerrot family and co-managed by the Charlottendal Animals and Culture association, Lilla Bullerbyn kindergarten and the Charlottendal Housing Cooperative**.** This rural community in southern Sweden is composed of cultivated land, forest ecosystems and their inhabitants, farm animals, temporary volunteers, residents and visitors. After a few months of immersion, the “community” appears as a field of parallel inhabitation, where actors share space while being embedded in a separate, and sometime contradictory relationscape.

Drawing on anthropological attention to situated knowledge and an inquiry of relational ecologies, the project combines durational immersion, participatory embodiement, and subjective mapping to explore the question of Habitat : how do various forms of inhabitating this place develop, interact and are continously negotiated?

This inquiry was birthed through months-long immersion, first as a volunteer and then as a facilitator, adapting the RSVP Cycle developed by Lawrence and Anna Halprin to structure the creative process. Here, the cycle highlights how questions, positionality, and practices unfolded over time.

Cycle 1 - Arriving and receiving narratives

The initial stage begins with arrival to the community as part of a volunteer program. Situational observations highlight a constrasting atmosphere of hospitality, beauty and high conflictuality. Dynamics regarding relationship, labor and authority reveal a cristallization of distrust around the figure of the land owner. ****

Participation in collaborative work (wood work, gardening, animal care, biodynamic farm networking) let emerge an environment where collective work occurs, potentiality is widely recognised but coordination, structure and supportive trustful relations are lacking.

Cycle 2 - Negociating a positionality of fairness

In the fall, unexpected practical challenges (housing issues related to mold) create distance from the location while being a fruitful ground for negociating a different position within the community : not volunteering but operating on a project-based collaboration under the umbrella of the european program.

Clarifying my own working conditions, material exchange, and personal boundaries allow to test intervention that would fit both personal development and ocmmunity interest. While defining a scope of work with the owner and inhabitants, the underlying tension of the community emerges :

• how do people experience and negotiate belonging within a place that is simultaneously privately owned and collectively inhabited?
• how does private ownership, lack of continuity and transparency shape collective practices?

Cycle 3 – Facilitating collective vision and decision-making

As relationships stabilize and new residents arrive, the research begins to engage more directly with collective interactions. Facilitation sessions are organized in which participants share visions, stories and beginning of collective organization. New data is also shared by a landscape architect that conducted an in depth study of this community’s design and dynamics in 2018.

These sessions reveal the core unavoidable barriers : unidentified collective purpose, unresolved long-term conflict, lack of transparency in the power and responsability birthed by the different ownerships status. They also highlight collective behavioral patterns : initiatives emerge organically depending on people’s profile and own interest, are implemented through self-leadership and in accepting to work within uncertainty of one’s scope of power, and often dissipate rather than become sustained collective structures.

Meeting forms of resistance or inertia in implementing more structured collective governance from all side highlight both of lack of transparency and trust as well as a desire to continue operating in the “happening and hosting” pattern of the place. In Charlottendals, clear intention and collective structure are replaced by a predisposition of the owners to allow diverse people to enter, contribute and leave according to personal rythms - an agenda perhaps explaining a reason to maintain the place in loose collective core fabric. and a attraction force of this place for a variety of people accepting the deal of experimenting within their ‘territory’.

At the same time, the surrounding forest environment begins to appear as a significant site of knowledge. Walks with residents knowledgeable about local vegetation and animal life reveal another layer of inhabitation that extends beyond human community dynamics.

• More on Naturelivs and inhabitants profile (to come) : cultural thread of ‘wilderness inhabitation’ linking many human inhabitants.

Cycle 4 – ONGOING : Mapping parallel inhabiting