In January, the lectorate invited the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Together with Toni Kritzer (student ATD) and Selçuk Balamir (community organizer, climate and housing activist), we prepared for a full programme; we organized a book presentation (of We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself, 2021) at Fort van Sjakoo, a lecture at the AHK Culture Club and a workshop at Buurthuis de Bol, which were all enthusiastically received and fully booked.  

 The Lab of Insurrectionary Imagination (Jay Jordan & Isa Fremaux) has twenty years of experience bringing together art and activism. They have organized a range of creative direct actions, and now live at the ZAD in France: a territory of wetlands that was saved from becoming an airport. This was a struggle that took years and was met with violence, destroying the infrastructure that had been created by the farmers, activists and others who had been living there for years. Designing rituals for harmed communities thus has become one of the important practices of Lab of II.

The SJDA lectorate has a specific approach to social justice, where we focus on moving in socially just ways in our everyday lives, in the arts, research, education and citizenship. We were particularly interested in the longstanding practice where they merge activism, everyday life and art, their analysis of the art world and their pedagogical approaches.

Isa and Jay made a radical decision around 2013 to move from London to the countryside of France. It didn’t make sense anymore to always return back from intense community organized direct actions to their daily lives in the London metropole.

These events allowed us to engage with their work, for example with their analysis of ‘extractivist artistic practices’ and its issues where value becomes transferred from one place to another and becomes detached from the locality and the communities from which they originate. 
“[extractivist art] takes ‘nature,’ stuff, material from somewhere and transforms it into something that gives value somewhere else. That value is always more important than the continuation of life of the communities from which wealth is extracted. So many artists make a career out of sucking value out of disaster, rebellion, animism, magic, whatever is a fashionable topic at the time, and regurgitate it into unsituated detached objects or experience elsewhere. Anywhere in fact, as long as the codes of the world of art function.”

How to develop authentic communal practices that are not based on appropriation, but depart from joyful collective creativity? 
We Are ‘Nature’ Defending (2021) describes the long struggle to save the ZAD. The book presentation at Fort van Sjakoo was introduced by Toni Kritzer, student at ATD. For them, ‘We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself’ functioned as ‘an amulet’ during the eviction of Lützerath in January 2023 

Lab of II’s lecture on Friday at the AHK Culture Club gave an insight into the twenty years of community organized direct actions and their more recent turn towards rituals and healing after the experience of the destruction of the ZAD and burnout. Community rituals for them are always organized according to two guidelines: no appropriation, and no sobriety. 

The workshop at Buurthuis de Bol was attended by an abundant group of activists and artists, where we explored the transformative power of artistic activism. Analyzing and re-enacting actions that successfully merge the border between political effectiveness and the creative dimension brought us to a discussion of the elements needed to engage in activism through creative and poetic acts not only for the short term, but also in the long run.

Thank you Isa & Jay for your inspiring visit!