What does it takes to live a feminist life? In ‘Notes on Fundamental Joy’, Carmen Winant is interweaving her writings with archival materials from feminist and lesbian separatist communes from the early 1980s, in the Pacific Northwest. Embracing of the ‘back to the land’ movement, they had also set up the Ovulars, a series of darkroom/photography workshops, staging themselves. In this remarkable project, Winant reminds us of the urgency to reclaim radical, collective feminist legacies, retrace and preserve these archives and sketch new artistic lineages. The book starts with the question “Is it possible to leave everything behind? It is possible to begin again, outside of and beyond every system of living that you’ve ever known, reinventing what it means (and looks like) to exist, as a body and its soul, on the land?”.