The zad (Zone to Defend), is 4000 acres of wetlands, farmland and forest in Brittany, due to be destroyed for a new airport. But in 2018, after 40 years of struggle, the infrastructure was defeated by occupying the land, farming and living a shared life to block the builders. For 6 years it was an autonomous commune without police and or state intervention, the government called it “the territory lost to the republic”. In 2020 a mass movement ‘les soulevements de la terre’ emerged from the zad, inspired by its strategies, of bringing farmers and activists together.

With Servane D., Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan three inhabitants of the autonomous commune Zone to Defend (Zad) in France will come to Vienna. In two workshops and two talks they will offer trainings in (anti-) repression, share tools for a regenerative activism, give insights into the mass movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre, that emerged from Zad, as well as into the creative resistance and joyful forms of disobedience that The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii) has been practising.