Program
In-between Everything: art & activism, nature & culture:
A non binary guide to creative rebellion with Isa Fremeaux and Jay Jordan
We invite you to an evening with art activists Isa Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, co-facilitators of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and of the Disobedient Art School Training for Trainers workshop. Join us as they give a talk on the “in between” of performance and pedagogy, protest and poetics, sharing stories about their adventures bringing artists and activists together to co-design and deploy creative acts of rebellion. This evening also marks the launch of their recent book We Are Nature Defending Itself: Entangling, Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones.
Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during a climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture, throwing snowballs at bankers, using ants to shut down banks, covering the Tate gallery in molasses and falling in love with utopias, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination believes in the beauty of art’s capacity to transform the world rather than simply represent it. Their latest book ‘We Are Nature Defending Itself: Entangling, Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones” will be present on the night – we hope you will be too!
We’re delighted to announce that Hodan Warsame (anti-oppression trainer and moderator) will be the moderator of the evening.
5 February 2022
20:00 — 21:00
€ 5
sold out
Click here for the current COVID-19 regulations.
We Are Nature Defending Itself
We Are Nature Defending Itself chronicles the story of the ZAD (zone to defend), a resistant land occupation emerging out of a decades-long struggle which stopped a new airport project. It blends rich eyewitness accounts with theory, inspired by a diverse array of approaches from neo-animism to revolutionary biology, insurrectionary writings and radical art history.
About Isa Fremeaux & Jay Jordan
Isa Fremeaux (she/her) is an educator, facilitator and author. She became a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College-University of London (UK) where she worked for 10 years, before deserting the neo-liberal academy to embrace freedom and collective life.
Engaged in social movements for almost 20 years, she had facilitated assemblies gathering several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, trained thousands of people to reinvent modes of disobedience…
Her passion is to explore collective dynamics and all the ways in which these can be made more fruitful and joyful, notably through popular education and rituals.
Jay (formerly John) Jordan or JJ (he/they) is labelled a “Domestic Extremist” by the UK police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the French press. Author, art activist, part-time sex worker and full time trouble maker, JJ has spent three decades applying what he learnt from theatre and performance art to direct action.
They like spaces betwixt and between of all sorts, especially between art and activism, culture and “nature”, the masculine and feminine, protest and proposition, reality and fiction. He has performed in museums and International Theater Festivals, trained people in squats, co-organised climate camps, choreographed carnivalesque riots, written a BBC radio play for today, and an opera-for-one.
They live on the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des Landes, and co-facilitate the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.
“It reminds us of the time when it was still possible for free theatre to try out a loving anarchic social utopias… This is about saying goodbye to representation and is therefore the most radical form of theatre”
– Frauke Hartman in The Frankfurter Rundshcau, Reviewing: Flow, Swarm, Flood. International Summer Festival, Kampnagel, Hamburg, 2010.
“This isn’t a normal traveling theatre company you know.”
– Scotland Yard, 2004 (British Police HQ)