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ISABELLE FREMEAUX is an educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London.
JAY JORDAN is an art activist and author, co-founder of Reclaim the Streets and The Clandestine Insurgent Clown Army.
Together they co-facilitate the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.
VAGABONDS 003
We Are ‘Nature' Defending Itself
Entangling Art, Activism & Autonomous Zones
Isabelle Fremeaux &
Jay Jordan
October 2021
In 2008, as the storms of the financial crash started to blow, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan deserted the metropolis and their academic jobs, embarking on a journey across Europe in search for postcapitalist utopias. They wanted their art activism to no longer be uprooted.
They arrived at a place French politicians had declared “lost to the republic”, known by those who inhabited it as la ZAD (the ‘zone to defend’): a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, illegally occupying 4,000 acres of wetlands where an international airport was planned.
In 2018, the 40-year-long struggle snatched an incredible victory, defeating the infrastructure project through a powerful cocktail that merged creation and resistance.
Published in collaboration with the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest
Table of Contents
We need stories of victory! We need stories of transfomative imagination and wild adventures that somehow succeed against all odds. Jay and Isabelle, as always, think about organizing and activism like nobody else. They’ve given us more than an account–they’ve created a new myth that has the added benefit of being true.
Starhawk
