Category Archives: Activism

DEFENDING THE ZAD, by Mauvaise Troupe Collective

“Something is flowering in the forest, fields and hedgerows, of the bocage of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Nestled in a landscape that remains under threat by the building of a new airport, an experimental zone is proliferating, it’s called – La zad.

Since the victorious resistance to the 2012 wave of evictions, the zad has become a rallying cry, inspiring a multitude of other nodes of disobedience. The French government has announced that the riot police might return to the territory and the process of compulsory purchases has begun again. This text is an echo of this political adventure and passionately calls for us all to defend the zad.

La Mauvaise Troupe is an ever mutating collective that formed during the editing of the book Constellations: Revolutionary trajectories of the young 21st century, published by Eclat, in 2014. This spring the collective will publish their second work, on the similar and kindred stories of the zad of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in North Western France and the No-TAV resistance to the high speed train project in the Valley de Susa, norther Italy.”

Edited by l’éclat

www.lyber-eclat.net

https://constellations.boum.org

RECIPES FOR DISASTER – an anarchist cookbook

“You must always have a secret plan. Everything depends on this: it is the only question. So as not be conquered by the conquered territory in which you lead your life, so as not to feel the horrible weight of inertia wrecking your will and bending you to the ground, so as not to spend a single night more wondering what there is to do or how to connect with your neighbours and countrymen, you must always make secret plans without respite. Plan for adventure, plan for pleasure, plan for pandemonium, as you wish; but plan, lay plans constantly.

And when you come to, on the steps of the presidential palace, in the green grass beside the highway, in your cell’s gloomy solitude, your secret plan finished or failed, ask your comrades, ask your cellmates, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the sea, ask everything that ponders, everything that wanders, everything that sings, everything that stings – ask them what time it is; and your comrades, your cellmates, the wind, the waves, the stars, the sea all will answer: ‘It is time for a new secret plan. So as not to be the martyred slave of routine, plan adventure, plan pleasure, plan pandemonium, as you wish; but plan, plan secretly and without respite.'”

Edited by CrimethInc.

ART AND REVOLUTION – Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, by Gerald Raunig

“Art and Revolution investigates practices emerging in neighbouring zones where art and revolution overlap for a limited time, in more or less well developed forms. Yet even when their rapprochement fails, traces of the overlap can still be recognised. They will be analysed here through various practices, from Courbet to Russian Futurism and Constructivism, from the Viennese Actionists and the Situationists International to the PublixTheatreCaravan in Genoa.

Often activist practices are not included in the narratives and archives of political history and art theory, or only acknowledged when purged of their radical aspects. In order to break through these mechanisms of exclusion or recodification, an as yet missing theorisation of activist art practices has to develop with new concept-clusters connecting contexts in ways not previously acknowledged.

Gerald Raunig has written an alternative history of the “long twentieth century” that resists flat notions of linear progress current in the objectivistic historiography. Instead it chronicles the attempts that were made repeatedly to burst out of this constructed continuum. It will encourage a new generation of artists and thinkers to work towards the explosive nexus of art and activism.”

Edited by Semiotext(e) Active Agents, distributed by The MIT Press