When you are young, you live within the system you were born into. That system may already feel restrictive in certain ways, but as long as you are still finding your place, you do not necessarily question the system itself. You study, start working, take on responsibilities, build a life and, in doing so, gradually make it clearer what place you occupy within that whole. Perhaps it is precisely at that point, when you are more or less settled, that the question begins to arise: is this it?
For us, that gradually led to another question. No longer simply what we could do differently within the existing way of life, but whether we could also take back some control over the conditions under which we lived. If you do not want to simply continue following the system as a given, where do you begin?
One of the ideas that emerged from this was surprisingly concrete: if you divide the available surface area of the planet by the number of people, each person would have roughly 1.6 hectares at their disposal. Of course, this is not a practical way of dividing up the world, nor is it a proposal to give everyone a piece of land measuring 1.6 hectares. It was mainly a way of thinking about the relationship between space, resources, food and the number of people the Earth has to support. Moreover, we do not use only what we produce ourselves. We depend to a large extent on production, infrastructure and raw materials elsewhere. If you genuinely want to remain within the limits of what is available, you therefore have to be able to live with less space and fewer resources than those theoretical 1.6 hectares per person.
That idea took on an unexpected historical dimension when we read in documents about the region how a traditional farm and a family in the Dordogne could once live on around six hectares. This did not mean six hectares of intensively cultivated farmland: approximately 45 percent consisted of woodland and 55 percent of pasture and cultivated land. It was a mixed system in which the different functions of the land complemented one another, and in which a family, with a way of life very different from ours, could provide for most of its own needs.
From that moment on, six hectares was no longer simply an amount of land to us. It became an interesting scale. Not because we thought we could or should recreate exactly the same way of life, but because it was a concrete historical indication that such an area could once have formed the basis for an independent existence. When we subsequently came across a 6.16-hectare property for sale in the Dordogne, the coincidence was hard to ignore. The fact that it was precisely in the region where we could imagine ourselves living made the choice even easier. France itself had never been a predetermined destination. We mainly wanted to leave Belgium and live further south, while still remaining in Western Europe: a climate that was clearly different from Belgium's, without having to go as far as Provence, Spain or Italy. And when we saw the place itself and looked out over the landscape from the garden, the condition of the buildings hardly mattered anymore. The structures were ruins and in an advanced state of decay. The view was breathtakingly beautiful.
At that point, we did not have a fully worked-out answer to the question of exactly what we were going to do with those 6.16 hectares. That was not the most important question either. The starting point was rather that we wanted to free up a piece of the world: to acquire a place that did not have to function entirely according to the logic of the existing system and where, within the limits of what was legally, financially and practically possible, we could decide for ourselves how we wanted to live and make our home.
Completely stepping outside the system was never really the goal. It is hardly possible anyway. Even in a place that you try to make as self-sufficient as possible, there remain connections with the world outside: taxes, regulations, materials you have to buy, infrastructure, knowledge, people and all kinds of costs that do not disappear simply because you decide to become self-sufficient. The question was therefore not how we could leave the system, but how we could build our own system within it: a place that organises as much of its own food, energy, resources and rhythm as possible, without needing to cut itself off from the rest of the world.
That was the starting point. At the time, we had no idea what it would become in practice.