The repression of activism is growing everywhere, everything is done to scare people from fighting. Being prepared is one of the best weapons against this and theatre is a great tool for rehearsing repression. This workshop will train people to be able to run re-enactments of situations of police custody and interrogation, so as to prepare activists for eventual arrest by giving them knowledge about their legal rights but also an embodied taste of the experience of being detained in a police station.
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.
Isabelle Fremeaux (she/her) is a popular educator, action researcher and deserter of the neoliberal academy where for a decade she was Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck College London. Co-author (with Jay Jordan) of the film and book Les Sentiers de l’utopie (2011, La Découverte), together they coordinate The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii), bringing artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience. Jay and Isa live and work on the Zad of Notre-dame-des-landes, 'a territory lost to the republic,' according to the French government, where an international airport project was abandoned after a 40 years of struggle. Isa and Jay’s latest book is about the Zad: We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Vagabonds/Pluto/Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2021).
