"To defend a territory, you have to inhabit it"
Connecting our fall and summer discussions of land, labor, and occupations
Hi folks! Happy to be writing here again. Recent weeks found me deep in the brain fog, having finally succumbed to a COVID infection — I’d managed to avoid it until now! Even with the recent booster, I was easily sick for two weeks, and still dealing with fatigue after that. All that to say that I hope you are taking care of yourselves and one another as we head into the general virus-sharing season.
And speaking of interesting and unpredictable experiments in sharing… this week I want to introduce you, if you don’t already know about it, to the ZAD, a wild attempt at sharing and collective living if ever there was one.
In our October essays we talked about some of what characterizes the links between lack of access to land and the need to engage in extractive and/or unnecessary forms of labor, and how that labor can further alienate us from ourselves and the lands on which we live. We offered as alternatives practices that might reconstruct our experience of time and place in ways that don't continually align our own interests and solidarity with the extractive economic structures in which we tend to find ourselves trapped. We did not, however, discuss so much what it would be like to try and take things one step further — to flee the trap, if that is at all possible.
Well then: what might that look like? That is what artists Isa Fremaux and Jay Jordan of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination both sought to find out — and a good many other people too — though Isa and Jay happened to write a book about it.
That book, We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself, is also a critique of the way we tend to make art these days: the creation of representations or provocations to 'reflect' or 'consider' a given trouble in the world. In their work, which brought artists and activists together to design what were often large, spectacular actions, the pair had already sought to push their art into something more transformative, more alive. Yet they still felt a tension:
“We would always return home to an everyday life still besieged by capitalism. Our forms of life would continue to nourish the extractivist logic of the capitalist metropolis. We had to do something before the fissure became an abyss. And so we deserted, for something very different.”
That 'something very different' involved moving to rural farmland in France that was also the site of resistance, for decades, against official plans to build an additional airport. With tens of thousands of others who showed up for key moments of action, they continued to resist the possibility of turning hedgerows and wetlands and fields into tarmac. And inbetween, with hundreds who likewise inhabited what became known as 'the ZAD,' they took part in setting up a collective form of life quite different from their prior lives as cosmopolitan artist-activists.
“It would only be here on the zad, defending this threatened land from the spread of the metropolis, that we began to feel what it meant to be truly free and that meant being caught up in the necessities of a shared everyday life. When you become attached to somewhere, when you realize that you can become the territory, freedom no longer floats in the air but lives in the relationships and the ties of need and desire that you build. We fell in love with this place and its rebel inhabitants and thus became free to overcome fear and put our lives in the way of those who wanted to destroy what would become our home. And when we let our souls do that, we discovered that the more we inhabited this place, the more it inhabited us.”
“ZAD” was originally a play on the planning term used by the French state to mark areas set aside for development, “Zones d'Aménagement Différé.” The resisting farmers began to call it instead the “zone à défendre,” or “Zone to Defend.” While their site, the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, is where the term originated, “zone to defend” has come to be used for other land occupations in France, though not all involve the same decentralized self-governing structure that characterizes the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
There, the ZAD is made up of many collectives that produce and organize the shared life in the space, from building to brewing, from housing to shared holiday rituals. It is life much as it was lived in this countryside for centuries, long before someone sought to profit from building a fancier airport than the one already present in the city nearby.
That collective life in its present form really began to be built around 2009, after a climate activist camp was held on the ZAD, and attendees were asked if they might stay and squat in the zone. The invite came from farming families frustrated with the expropriations and concerned about the loss of the land. “To defend a territory, you have to inhabit it,” they told their activist guests.
While the influx of new residents influenced the course of the ZAD, the prior organizing history is important to keep in mind: the airport had been successfully resisted for decades, not by outside environmental activists, but by farmers who simply refused to leave. Many of these farmers were also involved in labor struggles with agricultural workers in the region. This provided the foundation, rooted in the local community, upon which the larger, splashier acts of resistance could be staged.
In fact it would be a hunger strike by some of the earlier farmers that led to a moment of intense retaliation by the French government in 2012. But for once, both the state and its attendant profiteers lost. Even with the repeated deployment of thousands of heavily armored and weaponized police troops who brought in tanks and tore down houses and bombarded the residents with poisonous gas and more. Eventually, the government backed down, aware they were likely going to kill someone, and worried about their public image at a moment then close to an election.
And so an act of rebellious occupation — which was also an act of commoning, of reorganizing everyday life so as no longer to be captured by capital — won: the airport was defeated. Whether or not the longer victory of being allowed to live in the self-governing, collectively-owned microcosm of the ZAD will also win remains to be seen. The French government, after cancelling the airport in 2018, continued to bulldoze homes unless paperwork was signed showing 'proper' ownership. At first the state specifically insisted on individual ownership, but members of the ZAD, unwilling to give up their common vision, attempted their own bit of bureaucratic magic and presented a plan of collective ownership. It was a gamble, as they admit. Yet at this point in time, they are still there — inhabiting and being inhabited by it, as they might say.
This is quite the truncated version of this story. I do hope you will take a moment to check out some of the resources here that tell the story a little more in-depth. I very much recommend Jay and Isa’s presentation, done as part of their tour when the book first came out, which weaves together both their personal stories and the ZAD’s longer history, with images of the site and the state’s attacks. That’s here:
You can jump past the first six minutes if you want to skip all the introductions and celebratory ‘we launched a book’ talk. The presentation also covers a bit of their work with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. This includes their experiments with art-activism collaborations that focus on climate, which sets up some of their reasons for heading to France, before the full story of the ZAD begins around the 34-minute mark.
The pair also took part in a short film in which a few ZAD residents discuss life in the zone and share some of its history:
There’s plenty to read on the ZAD, (or specifically, on the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes) including its original blog (in French but look for the translation options at the top): https://zad.nadir.org/
And certainly I suggest the book (currently 50% off at Pluto Press, as I just happened to see).
For those who prefer to listen rather than read, here are some podcast interviews with Jay and Isa:
If you watch some of the videos above, you might be tempted to conclude that the ZAD kind of looks like Occupy gone extreme, blended with a permaculture farm stuck in a lot of mud. (I’ve never visited the ZAD but I’ll be mindful both of the season and my footwear should I ever have the opportunity.) But it’s actually the interplay of all these things that I find inspiring: it’s the spirit of resistance matched with the reality of collaboratively working with the land in a way that maintains both it and ourselves.
The bocage of the ZAD includes not just fields for farming and woods but wetlands. Wetlands, so important for climate and water quality and biodiversity, tend to have mud. To both protect the mud and use it (for it turns out, the mud was also quite useful in the protracted battles with police) — to see it as something to defend, not something to avoid — these days, this is a radical reorientation in our world.
And the buildings in the ZAD? Half look like nothing you’ve ever seen, because they don’t have to. This is collective DIY art not as a flippant side project but as part of common life. And it might all have been taken away, so that some businessmen could fly in and out of a slightly newer building. But it wasn’t. For the simple reason that some people chose to stay.
Thanks for reading Unsettling. Until next time,
Meg