John Jordan

Labelled a “Domestic Extremist” by the police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the press, John Jordan has spent the last 25 years merging art and activism. He has worked in various settings from Museums to squatted social centres, International Theatre Festivals to climate camps. He Co-founded the creative direct action groups Reclaim the Streets and the Clown Army, Co-edited We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism (2003, Verso), co-wrote A users Guide to demanding the Impossible (with Gaving Grindon, Autonomedia, 2009) and the film/book Les Sentiers de L’utopie (with Isabelle Fremeaux, La zone/ La découverte,2011). He now co-facilitates the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii), with Isabelle Fremeaux, bringing artists and activists together to design new forms of direct action. Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during a climate summit, throwing snowballs at bankers, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a power station, running workshops in postcapitalism and refusing to be censored by the Tate Modern, the
Labofii now lives on the autonomous zone of la zad of Notre-dame-des-Landes. The zad was once Europe’s largest occupied territory, living without police or government intervention for 6 years, and which in 2018 won it’s fight against the building of international airport. Despite the fact that in spring 2018 the occupiers, who had saved the wetlands from concrete, were attacked by France’s larges police operation since may 1968, much of the zad remains and is now fighting to continue the large scale experiment in commoning.