We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself

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As the storms of the 2008 financial crash started to blow, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan embarked on a journey across Europe searching for post-capitalist utopias. Deserting the metropolis and their academic jobs, they rediscovered their art and activism in an autonomous zone called the ZAD, or ‘Zone to Defend’. A place French politicians had declared ‘lost to the republic’, the ZAD was a messy, muddy, imperfect but extraordinary canvas of commoning. Its inhabitants illegally occupied 4,000 acres of wetlands earmarked for an airport. It is where, in 2018, a 40-year-long struggle for autonomy snatched an incredible victory, defeating the capitalist development project through a powerful cocktail of creation and resistance, building and fighting. This is a story of adventure, where art, activism and everyday life became truly entangled; and the discovery that the more you inhabit somewhere, the more it inhabits you. It blends rich, raw eyewitness accounts with theory, inspired by a diverse array of approaches, from neo-animism to revolutionary biology, insurrectionary tracts to radical art history. Show more