Our ecotopian experience started at Kombinatas Fest, in a north-east lithuanian campsite, the 15th of August.
Getting there from Barcelona was a challenging experience on itself, taking into account our willigness to avoid planes. But we achieved it!! And realised that there is still much to be done in improving train connections, prices and bike users friendlyness.
In that last aspect, there was one key ingredient that helped us a lot: bike sharing among the ecotopian group. Since the group was changing, there were two kind and cool people leaving two bikes that were incredible matching our sizes and expectations.
Let’s now leave the preparation and focus on the days we spent together.
Kombinatas Fest (kombinatasfest.org) is a festival happening yearly since 2020 and taking place at Saugus Atstumas campsite – a collectively build homestead that hosts different non-commercial events and gatherings.
The festival organizers were a bunch of motivated and friendly people eager to welcome everyone and creating spaces for political discussions and workshops. What was incredibly nice was that the festival felt familiar and well organised and structured at the same time.
This year festival’s topic was “home”, in the broadest meaning of the word. The programme include activities about the following topics: the understanding of our body as our home, housing issues and diferents movements and organisations that are rising as a response to them, involuntary migrants, migrations and the border regime as a neocolonial reality, war and Palestine.
As listed above, you can imagine the programme was broad and coming from Barcelona -a city struggling from hard gentrification and turistification processes- the festival’s topic was touching us.
As it is said: “respect existance or expect resistance”, the housing movements are really active in Barcelona, claiming tenants’ rights, stopping evictions and liberating spaces. Addressing housing movement, there was a talk that connected with what we are experiencing in our city: a member of a Czech Tenant Union explained strategies to organise tenants in order to build resistance in front of capitalistic conditions that threaten our homes. The speaker emphasized the importance of knocking neighboors’ doors and inviting them to express themselves and defending tenants’ interests not as a service but as a political and solidarity action.
Apart from the discussions and workshops, the festival also included a night programme with live concerts and djs.
Being an ecotopian outsider at that moment, while I was trying to memorise their names and pronouns, I realised I was going to join a great team. Out of their bikes, ecotopians couldn’t stop dancing with the most original, fun and energetic moves you can imagine.
During the circle (ecotopian assambly) before leaving the festival, I also realised that the tour involves an amazing and collective amount of work and planification: from carrying comunal stuff to scouting, dumpster diving, cleaning, cooking, etc.
The route we went across next days was extremely diverse, including both raining and sunny days, green forests and big lakes but also a few too busy highways. We happily ate from apple and mirabelle trees but also encountered some difficulties, as some of us were struggling with feeling sick due to the Covid and we needed to split the group.
Sometimes I felt overwhelmed, now after almost 60km per day and all the work done, I think ecotopia is only possible thanks to collective motivation and efforts. In few words: soildarity in practice and on wheels.
