20. Entangling art, activism & ritual // ISA FREMEAUX

Forest of Thought

How do we manifest the world we would like to see? How are art and activism connected to things like magic and ritual? How does being rooted in a place help us defend it? In this episode I visit Isa Fremeaux at the ZAD (zone à defendre) in Brittany, France, where an unlikely alliance of local residents and activists succeeded in stopping the building of a planned airport. Isa shares her experiences of working at the intersection of art and activism, and we explore what it means to create the worlds we want to inhabit.

Isa Fremeaux is a writer, activist and educator, formerly senior lecturer in Media and Cultural studies at Birckbeck College, London. Together with her partner Jay Jordan she has, among other things, created Pathways to Utopia, a film/book project exploring utopian communities in Europe, and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, a place for experiments at the intersection of art and activism. Their book “We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself – Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones” explores these ideas further and takes us along on part of the journey of the ZAD.

LINKS:

• Isa and Jay’s book: We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself – Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345871/we-are-nature-defending-itself/
• Pathways to Utopia: https://lessentiersdelutopie.wordpress.com/trailer/
• Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: https://labo.zone/
• Links to the six points: https://zad.nadir.org/IMG/pdf/6pointszad-a3-2.pdf
• The invisible committee: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/comite-invisible

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