Join us in reading We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan.

In 2008, as the storms of the financial crash blew, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan deserted the metropolis and their academic jobs, travelling across Europe in search of post-capitalist utopias. They wanted their art activism to no longer be uprooted. They arrived at a place French politicians had declared lost to the republic, otherwise know as the zad (the zone to defend): a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, illegally occupying 4,000 acres of wetlands where an international airport was planned. In 2018, the 40-year-long struggle snatched an incredible victory, defeating the airport expansion project through a powerful cocktail that merged creation and resistance. Fremeaux and Jordan blend rich eyewitness accounts with theory, inspired by a diverse array of approaches, from neo-animism to revolutionary biology, insurrectionary writings and radical art history.

As with all our previous Slow Reading sessions, we will be reading We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself together, out loud and slowly. No special expertise is needed to participate in these sessions other than an interest in contemporary ecological issues, reading with others, and a willingness to discuss ideas. All sessions will be facilitated by Andrew Goffey, Associate Professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts, at University of Nottingham.

The Slow Reading Group is an informal space for collectively reading meaningful texts that open out the ideas and themes from our research-based events at Nottingham Contemporary and the Three Ecologies Research Group at the University of Nottingham. Informed by Félix Guattari’s notion of the Three Ecologies - the idea that our environmental crisis relates to our contemporary capitalism - and by theories of decolonisation and intersectionality, the reading group invites you to plot connections between these fields, combining academic and everyday approaches to research.

A PDF copy of the text will be provided during the session.

Online. Free. Limited Capacity. Booking required.

Sessions take place on the following dates:

Mon 21 Apr

Mon 19 May

Mon 16 Jun - in person at Nottingham Contemporary, with a hybrid option to join online

Mon 21 Jul

Mon 18 Aug

Mon 15 Sep

Isabelle Fremeaux is an educator, facilitator 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.

Engaged in social movements for almost 20 years, she has facilitated assemblies gathering several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, and 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. She happily shares her skills to support and accompany various collectives, groups and associations in their flourishing. Isabelle lives on the zad in Notre-Dame-des Landes, and co-facilitates the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.

She has co-written the book/film Les Sentiers de l’Utopie (with Jay Jordan, Zones/La Découverte, 2011) and We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (with Jay Jordan, Vagabonds/Pluto/Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2021).

Jay Jordan is an art activist, author, part time sex worker, and full time troublemaker labelled a “domestic extremist” by the UK police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the French press. Jay Jordan has spent three decades applying what he learnt from theatre and performance art to direct action. They founded the direct action groups Reclaim the Streets and the Clown Army, worked as a cinematographer for Naomi Klein’s The Take, co-edited the book We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism (Verso 2004) and lectures in theatre and fine art.

Andrew Goffey is an associate professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies and the director of the Centre for Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is the author, with Matthew Fuller of Evil Media, the editor, with Eric Alliez, of The Guattari Effect, and with Roland Faber, of The Allure of Things. He has also translated numerous books, including Lines of Flight and Schizoanalytic Cartographies, by Felix Guattari, and Capitalist Sorcery, In Catastrophic Times and Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, by Isabelle Stengers. He is currently doing research on ecology and aesthetics and has collaborated with Nottingham Contemporary for a number of years.

Access

This event will be held online via Zoom. A zoom link will be emailed to you as part of your booking confirmation.

Reading materials will be provided in PDF form during the session.

One session will be held in-person, with a hybrid option to join online. This will take place in Gallery 0 at Nottingham Contemporary.

Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here.

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.