Lecture: Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

About the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Since its birth in a London squat, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination has been dedicated to multiplying edges of all sorts. Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during Copenhagen's UN climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, building an illegal lighthouse on the site of an airport control tower, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station and refusing to be censored by London's Tate Modern museum, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination has been walking on the tightrope between art and activism since 2004.

Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination brings together artists and activists to co-design and deploy creative forms of direct-action, which aim to be as joyful as they are politically effective. Creation and resistance, protest and proposition are the entwined DNA strands of our practice. Whether training folk or co-organising actions, at the heart of everything we do are horizontal ways of relating and organising ourselves. They call their work experiments, because they never know what might emerge but they do know that the role of art in the Capitalocene can no longer be to show the world to people but to transform it together.

Programme

18.30 Doors open

19:00 - 20:30 Lecture by Isa Fremeaux and Jay of Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination + Q&A

20.30-22.00: Drinks at the bar 

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Isa Fremeaux (she/her) is an educator, facilitator and author. Engaged in social movements for almost 20 years, she has facilitated assemblies gathering several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, trained thousands of people to reinvent modes of disobedience... Her passion is to explore collective dynamics and all the ways in which these can be made more fruitful and joyful, notably through popular education and rituals. She happily shares her skills to support and accompany various collectives, groups and associations in their flourishing.

Jay (formerly John) Jordan or JJ (she/they) is an author, art activist, part-time sex worker and full time trouble maker. They have been labelled a "Domestic Extremist" by the UK police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the French press. JJ has spent three decades applying what they learnt from theatre and performance art to direct action.
They like spaces betwixt and between of all sorts, especially between art and activism, culture and "nature", the masculine and feminine, protest and proposition. They have performed in museums and International Theater Festivals, trained people in squats, co-organised climate camps, choreographed carnivalesque riots, written a BBC radio play for today, and an opera-for-one.