The Muddy Witchcraft of Utopian Worldmaking: Zemlja za nas’s Feminist Activism

Julia Alekseyeva

Karla Crnčević’s 65-minute documentary Zemlja za nas (The Ground Where We Stand, 2024) begins with a soft, wavelike movement. The camera has been placed on a ferry, which is slowly approaching the island of Brač, off the coast of Croatia. The director’s narration begins:

Like any great fairy tale, this one begins softly and dreamily. With the Orion constellation in the sky, wild cats and a long-held dream of wilderness. In this tale, too, the magical and the supernatural are intertwined with the real, blurring the line between reality and imagination.

The gentle camera movement immerses the viewer in a dream-like experience, as if we are being ferried across the River Styx. From here the documentarist’s positionality is made apparent: we are entering a sacred space, or at least a space sacred to her. Already, at the very beginning, the documentary rejects the veneer of objectivity and becomes something strange and new.

Zemlja za nas, literally “The Land is for Us” in Serbo-Croatian, is not just the name of the documentary but the brand of olive oil created by the woman-led commune on Brač. These women, who are sometimes accompanied by men and sometimes also have children, are immediately described as quasi-supernatural beings, as the narrator, the filmmaker—and occasional commune participant Karla Crnčević—continues to narrate in her poetic prologue: “I met those whom the islanders call neither women nor devils. They called them witches.”

Yet where one would perhaps expect an explicitly propagandistic image of an idyllic island commune of women, with free-flowing hair and peasant blouses, the film instead supplies a much more complicated portrayal. The majority of the documentary consists of long, drawn-out conversations between different women in the collective, which center their grievances. Antonela, for instance, is accused of being domineering and controlling; Armina, who is the part-time career for a child, accuses another woman of taking too much time off work to deal with her post-traumatic stress disorder. Tension builds in the conclusion, when part-time members of the collective (who often live in nearby cities across former Yugoslavia) meet with full-time members (residing on the island year-round) to discuss the possibility of a land trust. Armina points out her vulnerable position as a full-time resident: should she have as much say as a bourgeois, land-owning city-dweller, for whom the collective is merely a fun venture and a social experiment? As she describes her own firm belief in collective ownership, without official deed or title, she is brought to tears. Thus, the fundamentally anarchist ideology of the commune is brought into tension with its sustainability in a capitalist world.

There is no simple story of victimhood or abuse in this discussion drama.¹ As is the case with so many disagreements in leftist organizing spaces, often the story boils down to miscommunication, scarcity, economic inequality (a resentment usually reserved for a mismatch of class and personal finances), and overall exhaustion. Sometimes the women simply don’t like each other very much—an inevitability in any space where one doesn’t choose one’s friends, leftist or otherwise. Watching the film, I found myself immediately reminded of my own organizing work, and my last year and a half working an official conflict-resolution role in my local DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) chapter. My brain kicked into fix-it mode: Surely things would be easier if they had a mediator, who could lead a structured conversation! Perhaps a convention could be formed! Perhaps bylaws could be written! Couldn’t there be a structure that separated meaningfully between part-time and full-time members of the collective, that acknowledged the additional work required of some, and gave them certain rights and privileges in return?

It felt all too familiar: the conflict would exist regardless, as conflict is not only inevitable but properly endemic to all organizing spaces, especially in a capitalist world that makes collective ownership of anything (whether property, or business, or assets, or progeny) increasingly impossible. Yet this community desire for collective ownership is not unprecedented, as Kristen Ghodsee’s Everyday Utopia (2023) has shown in its broad millennia-sweeping descriptions of successful (and non-cult!) utopian collectives.² As long as humans have walked the earth, we have shared land and resources. David Graeber³ especially has shown that the anthropological record depicts a species more collectively-oriented than the self-interested automatons described by Milton Friedman-influenced, capital-pilled North American economists. Yet instead of supporting the fundamentally human drive to live and work together, modern social and economic conditions make such a way of life nearly structurally impossible, leading to the inevitable burnout of activists and laborers worldwide. Here, perhaps, is a tentative answer to the age-old question: Why is there so much conflict in leftist organizing spaces? The reply: It is structurally so. Because to do the work, one has to move the entire foundation of the world. It requires a kind of transmutation, an alchemy that is no less real for being magical at heart.

In Zemlja za nas, the work of Utopia is muddy and imperfect witchcraft, but it results in occasional bursts of beauty. In one scene, as the women are resting after a long day of harvesting, the camera witnesses a glorious sunset, as the traditional humorous Macedonian folk song Sedna baba da večera (“grannie sits down to dinner”) plays in the background, sung by the women-led group Kamene Babe. Kamene babe means “stone grannies,” and refers to the “amorphous stone rubble… found in the Primorje-Mediterranean region of Croatia.”⁴ According to the singers’ bio, “[t]hese rocks convey the trace of archaic culture and female cult; bring happiness, well-being and fertility to people, fields, and places.”⁵ The group, like the film, reveals the possibility of an “archaic culture”—of something wild and pagan—as coexisting peacefully, yet in productive tension, with Marxism and anarchism. It is an anti-modernity that rejects fascistic mysticism in favor of what I theorize, alongside Jane Bennett, as re-enchantment or, in Bennett’s words, a “metamorphosis [that] carries within it the lure of the new, the green of the grass on the far side, the pleasure of the feeling of movement, and the magic of transformation.”⁶

By chance, I had just recently seen Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (2016), a drama about a mid-divorce Parisian philosophy teacher (Isabelle Hupert), who starts spending time at her old student’s radical anarchist commune in the Rhône-Alpes region. I am very easily seduced by representations of communal life generally, especially in Europe, and watching the scenes of utopian mountain existence in the French Alps led me, as many things do these days, to browsing dilapidated crumbling French real estate in nearby regions. In Hansen-Løve’s film, the philosophy commune of the Alps provides a refreshing alternative to the clean-cut, orderly-on-paper bourgeois existence of the neurotic French philo-prof and her crumbling and cold personal relationships. The film seemed to emerge as if beamed directly from the deep desires of my own brain, and those of my friends, for whom “Let’s just get an old house and start a commune in upstate New York, Vermont, or Western Massachusetts” is as common of a refrain as “How are your kids?”. Hansen-Løve’s film is beautiful wish-fulfillment. To this idyll, Zemlja za nas provides an important corrective, yet one which shares with the French film a sincere ideological commitment.

Here another ideological commitment comes into play. The women of Zemlja za nas arrive from many different territories across former Yugoslavia, and the marketing of the film emphasizes the multicultural, but singularly Yugoslavian, characteristic of the film.⁷ I don’t want to dwell on the Yugoslavian nature of the film too intensely, but it is worth noting that the younger (below 50) generation of ex-Yugoslavs, especially those who have emigrated elsewhere, have become increasingly proud of, and insistent on, their Yugoslav origins. In the field of Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (formerly Slavic Studies), two sister organizations have cropped up that critically engage with the Soviet past from a distinctly leftist perspective: the Black Sheep Society⁸ (full disclosure: I am an executive committee member), and the New Yugoslav Studies Association. The latter’s raison d’être is described in their “About”-page:

The “new” in our name refers not only to a renewed scholarly interest in a country that no longer exists, but also—and more importantly—to a shared methodological stance: namely, a refusal to accept ethno-nationalism and the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia as the only lens through which its significance ought to be viewed. Finally, it also signals an orientation toward the future of research in which Yugoslav critical, historical, social, cultural, and artistic interventions matter—in the region and beyond.⁹

The organization invokes the name Yugoslav proudly as a leftist gesture, one which is oriented toward the future rather than the past: what my former advisor, the late Svetlana Boym, might call a reflective rather than a restorative nostalgia.¹⁰ It refuses a fascistic pull towards ethnonationalism and instead renews interest in the liberatory potential of a “country that no longer exists.” As an immigrant from a place, not too far from Yugoslavia, that no longer exists,¹¹ I too feel a refusal of simplified narratives of triumph of Western capital over totalitarian communism. The New Yugoslavs and Zemlja za nas remind us, like much great media over the last decade on the post-Soviet regions, that a third, much more accurate, truth, exists, and has always existed: one emphasizing freedom and liberation, and the importance, quite literally, of getting one’s hands dirty.

Notes