Feÿtopia as Liminal Space: Governance, Co-founding, and the Art of Human Curation
Details
- Interviewee: Primavera
- Role: Community member & co-founder
- Community: Feÿtopia
- Location: Château de Fey, France
- Date: 2026-04-02
- Language: English
Summary
Primavera, a governance scholar and co-founder of Feytopia, reflects on how the community emerged from a shared vision during Covid lockdown at Chateau de Fey. She discusses the practice of 'social permaculture', the careful curation of people who amplify each other, as the foundation of intentional community. Primavera explores how Feytopia navigates the tension between decentralized aspiration and the benevolent centralized authority of founder Jess, arguing that naming this structure openly resolved significant friction. She describes Feytopia as a liminal space: not a permanent home but a horizon-expanding catalyst that spreads its values through the people it transforms.
Key quotes
We are very lucky because we have an amazing benevolent dictator. It resolves many governance issues that other communities face.
Things became smoother once Jess accepted her distinct responsibility openly.
It is not enough to just bring people. You need to bring different types of people and make sure they go well together and amplify each other.
People enjoy spending time together, discover affinities and complementary skills, and the project emerges as the intersection of everyone's passions.
You come, expand your horizon, and then you leave transformed because you have seen something you cannot unsee.
Transcript
---
interviewee: Primavera
community: Feytopia
location: France
featured_in_posts: none
transcript_format: clean
themes:
- Values
- Governance
- Connection
- Change
- Community
- Structure
---
# Interview Transcript: Primavera
**Community:** Château de Fey / Feytopia
**Interviewer:** Sharon Avraham
---
**Sharon:** Can you start with your name and where we are sitting right now?
**Primavera:** My name is Primavera, and we are sitting in the office of the Château de Fey.
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**Sharon:** How did you first hear about this place?
**Primavera:** I have known Jess for about seven years now. At the time she was running the château mainly as a wedding venue. Then the Covid confinement came, and during that period we started co-creating and conceiving the possibility that we could actually create an intentional community in the château.
We had been trying to set up an intentional community in Paris, and we were spending a lot of time looking for places but we could not find anything properly sized that could be rented to something other than a family. During the confinement we came into the château, which was mostly used for weddings and events. During the lockdown we started envisioning the possibility of creating an intentional community here instead of in Paris. That is how it slowly came into being.
---
**Sharon:** What is the idea behind this?
**Primavera:** The original idea was to create something similar to another intentional community, The Network. Over time it acquired its own flavor. If you ask different people you will get different visions, but the general gist is that it is a liminal space. It is a place people come to and come from.
One particular vision is about expanding horizons, expanding the horizon of possibilities. One way is simply demonstrating that it is possible to live in a different manner, which already changes many people's perceptions. But it goes much beyond that. It is about expanding dreams, encountering people who share similar values and ideas, and creating connections and collaborations.
When you are on your own, your ambition is limited to what you can do. When you start building communities and creating a larger aligned network, you can expand your ambitions because you can do things together.
There is a lot of visioning around what we call diversity training. There is also the concept of addressing the loneliness crisis and reinventing the way we live, not just sleeping in the same house but truly co-creating together.
We experiment with governance in ways that are less institutionalized, less rigid. There is not one strongly articulated mission, which actually enables many people to express their own visions.
---
**Sharon:** What was your personal motivation to jump into this?
**Primavera:** I am a governance scholar, and I have been interested in governance all my life. Most of my focus has been digital governance, but also governance of emergent communities like peer-to-peer networks and open source communities.
I have also been living in communities all my life. Except when I lived with my parents, I have always lived in community. In the US it is common to have co-living co-ops. I lived in some of those in Berkeley. When I came back to Italy, I created student clubs because it felt natural.
Before the confinement I considered myself deeply city based. I thought I would have a hard time living outside of a city because I need constant intellectual stimulation. The confinement brought me here, and I stayed because this is not just an intentional community in the countryside. It offers constant intellectual stimulation.
It feels like the best of both worlds. You get the benefits of nature and quality of life, but also concentrated stimulation because we can invite the people we want to spend time with. Instead of traveling an hour for a coffee, you bring them here and share life together.
There is something I discovered, which I call human externalities. When you bring someone into an existing pool of people, unexpected synergies arise. It strengthens bonds between the person and the community. From a health perspective, productivity perspective, social perspective, it is better.
---
**Sharon:** What would you say your role in this project is?
**Primavera:** In the beginning we spent an incredible amount of hours with Jess envisioning how to bring it about. I consider myself a co-founder.
From an execution perspective I contribute a lot, but I do not have an institutional position. I have been here since the beginning, so I understand the history and culture. I hold culture and texture. As new people come, I help enable smooth assimilation.
I organize workshops, bring intellectual deep dives, and invite many people here. I am a strong gravitational force. That shapes the flavor of the community. I may be responsible for bringing a lot of art and technology into the mix.
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**Sharon:** What is the potential of human curation in a space like this?
**Primavera:** I would say it is almost the most important thing. It is essentially the community. We call it social permaculture. It is not enough to just bring people. You need to bring different types of people and make sure they go well together and amplify each other.
At the beginning the initial people we brought shaped what the community became. The bootstrapping phase is crucial.
There is one approach where you have an idea and recruit people to implement it. Here it is different. People enjoy spending time together, discover affinities and complementary skills, and the project emerges as the intersection of everyone's passions. Then it becomes irresistible because everyone is driven by their own passion within it.
The question becomes: who are the people we want around the table, and who are the people we want in the château.
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**Sharon:** What about governance, given that there is an owner and a business here?
**Primavera:** We are very lucky because we have an amazing benevolent dictator. It resolves many governance issues that other communities face. When there is disagreement, we know Jess will eventually decide.
She is benevolent and cares about the community having agency, but she also holds financial and legal responsibility. There was a period where we tried to pretend governance was fully decentralized, but that invisible centralization created friction. Things became smoother once Jess accepted her distinct responsibility openly.
Feytopia also transcends the château. The community exists beyond the physical space. When we gather elsewhere, new governance structures emerge.
---
**Sharon:** What leadership qualities allow this to work?
**Primavera:** Jess navigates a fine line between authority and empowerment. We call it a matriarchy. The authority of a mother archetype nurtures and wants emancipation rather than control.
People care deeply about the well-being of the community. When tensions arise, the guiding question becomes what is best for the community rather than what is best for me. That makes compromise easier.
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**Sharon:** What is the role of this place in the wider structure of society?
**Primavera:** It is a liminal space. It is not a place where you are supposed to stay forever. It is closer to Burning Man in that sense. You come, expand your horizon, and then you leave transformed because you have seen something you cannot unsee.
People who have been here have gone on to instantiate new communities inspired by this one. It spreads through inspiration and catalyzing new realities.
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**Sharon:** Where do you see this in ten years?
**Primavera:** Feytopia is acquiring more gravitational pull. The space itself has limits in scalability, but new projects can grow around it. Ideally, there would be many similar communities around the world aligned in values, where you can travel and feel the same flavor.
Success is not about templating but about catalyzing new realities that carry related values while embedding their own flavor.