• Image of hooded and costumer figure surrounded by small fires at dusk, with trees in the background

    Autumn Equinox ritual on the zad, as part of C.A.R (Cellule d’Actions Rituelles) collaboration with artist duo -h-

  • Image of illuminated inland lighthouse at night.

    Lighting for opening performance of the Lighthouse on the zad, 2016

  • Black sigil drawn onto piece of wood in a forest

    Protective sigil on the zad

  • Notes made onto pink, yellow and orange Post-Its on a larger white piece of paper, with people's hands shown at the edge of the image

    Climate Games planning workshop ahead of COP21 climate talks (Paris), 2015

  • Two men working on bike maintenance, in front of a pink on green banner saying "Nature Doesn't Do Bailouts"

    Put The Fun Between Your Legs: bike maintenance workshop at the Arnolfini ahead of COP15 climate talks (Copenhagen), 2009

  • People on bikes in an open urban space, taking part in training for civil disobedience at COP15 (Copenhagen, 2009)

    Put The Fun Between Your Legs: bike swarm training, the Candy Factory, COP15 climate talks, 2009

  • The framework of a barn being raised by a large group of people. Trees and a rainbow can be seen in the background

    Raising the Gaitée, the zad

  • Art Not Oil being spelt out in large letters on large pieces of paper in the windows of Tate Modern

    Disobedience Makes History workshop, Tate Modern, 2010

  • A map of water routes to Kingsnorth Power Station in Kent

    Treasure Map for the Great Rebel Raft Regatta, Kingsnorth Climate Camp, 2008

Entangling Art, Activism and Everyday Life in the Capitalocene

16 April 2022 / 14:00-17:00

A Presentation and Workshop on Zoom by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), the UN climate scientists not known for their radical imagination, wrote in their 2018 report that if we want to avoid the worst of the climate breakdown we had 12 years left for “rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.

For us in the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii) this has to include art.

In a time of historical crises, is it enough to continue to represent the world, to make more performances about climate breakdown, more videos about forced migration, more installations about mass extinctions? How can art be anchored again, to place, time and everyday life ? How can our practice be a magickal force of transformation rather than another commodity on a market ?

This workshop and presentation by the Labofii will share stories and adventures inbetween art and activism and explore how art can become a means not an end in the battle of imagination that traverses this epoch.

This workshop follows on from SUSTAIN , a development programme for artists interested in low carbon artmaking run by Castlefield Gallery and the Aarhus Centre for Contemporary Art. There will be an in person gathering on Saturday 7th May (venue to be confirmed) for artists interested in intervening in the trajectory towards climate breakdown, with the intention of seeding a Greater Manchester/North West-based network of low carbon artists.

Isa Fremeaux (she/her) is an educator, facilitator, organiser and author. She grew up in France before moving to London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, French teacher and administrator of a community arts company, while completing a PhD thesis on the concept of community. She became a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College-University of London (UK) where she worked for 10 years, before leaving academia to embrace freedom and collective life.

Art activist, author, part-time sex worker and full-time trouble maker Jay (formerly John) Jordan (he/they) is labelled a “Domestic Extremist” by the UK police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the French press. Jay has spent three decades applying what he learnt from theatre and performance art to direct action. They co-founded the creative direct action movements ‘Reclaim the Streets’ and the ‘Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army”, and have performed in museums and International Theatre Festivals, choreographed carnivalesque riots, written a BBC radio play for today, and an opera-for-one.

Isa and Jay have co-authored the film and book Paths Through Utopias (2011, La Découverte) and the recent pamphlet We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself (2021, Pluto Press). Together they coordinate The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, bringing artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience, infamous for launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station, turning bikes into machines of disobedience during a climate summit and refusing to be censored by the BP sponsored Tate gallery.

Isa and Jay now inhabit the zad of Notre-dame-des-landes, ‘a territory lost to the republic,’ according to the French government, where an airport project was defeated after 40 years of resistance and which is now the site of a beautifully complex experiment in commoning.

@labofii

www.labo.zone

Register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/entangling-art-activism-and-everyday-life-in-the-capitalocene-tickets-293849059447