MON 27 MAY 2024
The compost we distributed last year has left its mark on my hand, where the nerves reach the sinews and the old surgical stitch marks throb. Then, we just kept moving. Kept committed not knowing where it would lead. Except to flowering, to some sort of coming together, to a harvest…but only if we kept working for it. Trusting in it.
Now we stand on fertile ground. Not yet lush, nutrient rich soil - something perhaps more like the TS Elliot line from the Wasteland – “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow, out of this stony rubbish?” Well, plenty. The ‘weeds,’ the seeds on the wind that make a place for themselves -make a habitat.
Jay and Isabel from the ZAD have just left us all whirling after days of deep thought and action that has provoked many questions and much potential. A year ago I devoured their pamphlet ‘We Are Nature Defending Itself’ - a practical and philosophical story of the entangled and extended autonomous rebel community that comprises the zad, located near the village of Notre Dame des Landes in Brittany. A profound tale of what it means to really inhabit, make and defend a place. I was struck by how they recounted how after years working at the frontline of urban activism, they ‘deserted the metropolis.’ This city of speculative land prices and co-opted culture. As we discussed our desire and need for time to try to take this place into community ownership the then owner said ‘Frankly, Fuck London, it’s lost to the developers…to money’. If everyone fucks London it will be. So we stay. We have wavered. The energy it takes. The forces to fight. This space is a lifeline for so much and so many – a site to build from, a model of how things can work differently – that together we can intervene in the property markets to bring buildings into community ownership, to safeguard their future as assets of true community value, unable to be sold for personal gain. A gift to a place.
As Starhawk says of ‘We Are Nature Defending Itself’: “We need stories of victory! We need stories of transformative imagination and wild adventures that somehow succeed against all odds. Jay and Isabel think about organising and activism like nobody else. They’ve given us more than an account – they’ve created a new myth that has the added benefit of being true.”
And we’ve been lucky to have them here. The doors have been open to community organisers, residents, researchers, artists, councillors… doors open to possibility. To think about what organising and activism looks like here in the complexities of life on a ‘typical’ street, in an urban neighbourhood. To analyse and bypass the forms of authority at play from local to infrastructure - the hierarchies and politics. The rules of a defunct game. Of what anarchism can teach local government. Of what local government needs to learn and implement fast. How can we create a revolution in planning law? How can we work in common and commoning and how is what we do here a different form of ‘reclaim the streets.’ How do you make a rebel street? What forces and behaviours prevent it? How do we create new rituals of place that build value and connections? We screen the Ealing comedy “Passport to Pimlico’ where the discovery of an ancient document lead the residents of Pimlico to declare themselves an independent state. We discuss the challenges and approaches to this place not in fact being an autonomous zone and of the frustrations and limitations in that. We talk of becoming the place, becoming the territory. Of how this begins in noticing. In acts of shared care. I walk out into the night, the sacred night of this sacred street on the sacred planet – “when land becomes sacred and struggle becomes an art of everyday life, magic happens.’ Magic is happening here in this small, cooperatively owned space in the middle of a surburban street. Magic can happen in unexpected places. We buzz with ideas as they leave. They built a lighthouse. Can we pull off the plan for a wind turbine here? Leonie’s keen to build a radio station? repurposing the substations? In the campaign to buy the building we made sure to emphasise the many voices and multiple communities that would benefit from this place. Not everyone wants to stand at the front. To conjure magic. “Yet everyone can be part of building a culture of rebellion: a set of values that embrace, encourage and promote radical political transformation. Building and partaking in such a culture is about learning to no longer ‘play safe’ and obey the rules given to us, but instead, to identify what one can do from wherever one is to support all those who are actively resisting.” (Isabel Fremeaux and Jay Jordan.)
From the archive
Mon 29 May
I had a feeling that this week would just read
COMPOST
COMPOST
COMPOST
I was resigning myself to that and how that this gigantic task would interfere with future days – a year ahead. I write this after shifting two more loads of compost with the help of Joanne and then Nick after an early morning call out on the street whatsapp. The youth project rubbish store is now full of compost ready for Wednesday repotting and bags are piled high outside our front door. The end of this intensive phase is in sight. Throwing myself into the physical labour has been good but it’s never the only thing. Living many lives. Returning to zoom calls with Repowering London or Octopus covered in mud. A race against time as the allotment holders who are promised free compost in exchange for having the delivery to their site take their barrow loads. There have been many chats amid the digging and loading. With Jane about allotment foxes and cameras. About how they have watched and come to know generations of fox families and observed unique behaviours and adaptations to human, urban life. With Alf an allotment elder about the Jamaican heat and his crop of Callaloo. I am sunburnt and aching. There have been highs and lows. Highs – the arrival of the compost, news of a massive pot donation, Octopus coming to install the scaffolding this Thursday and Friday. Lows. News from the owner saying they’ve had an offer from someone wanting to run a ‘community space and theatre’ though that someone needs to sell their house first and we still have time. Musing on the fact we have to keep explaining and proving that what we do is of community benefit and the space would be in community ownership and for this community benefit as Kristin and I climb fences lugging compost into local nursery schools and community groups on this mass collective growing project. Those sudden low feelings that interrupt the flow of work, the flow of love.
Considering how I get rid of this current load of compost on a bank holiday Monday with the school gates closed I remember a conversation about compost. Compost. Decomposition. Composition. There have been a lot of conversations about compost over the last week, about nutrient levels, fertility, nettles and a certain battle for resources. Working as artist steering committee member on the ‘Seeding the Commons’ project we discussed what that meant and that perhaps we were the compost. Cherry talked about an interview between biologist Merlin Sheldrake (author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures) and his brother Cosmo, a composer. Merlin writes that “composers make, decomposers unmake. And unless decomposers unmake, there isn’t anything that composers can make with…. any creative act emerges from the rich compost of story, memory, influence, and inspiration that grounds so much of present-tense experience. Decomposition and composition underwrite the regenerative capacity of the biosphere and it feels that these processes can contribute to the creation of new ideas and forms.” Growing sunflowers together, installing solar panels, imagining a new form of urban infrastructure and ecosystem - all a creative act, built of and from the entangled life of a community – a form of composing the future from the ground up.
