Dear blog readers. I thought as a way to introduce myself to you I would write a letter for reasons that will become clear as you read, I’m sorry it has not arrived in your hand addressed to you personally, but maybe you can imagine the sound and feel of opening an envelope.

I will be writing weekly on the blog, following two projects, that like all things beautiful sit on the edge between life and art, politics and the poetic, activism and performance. One will be our ( the collective that I work in THE LABORATORY OF INSURRECTIONARY IMAGINATION move from London to set up a rural postcapitalist community in Brittany and the other our latest experiment “What is Enough?” which will be launched in August in Hamburg as part of the Kampnagel Sommer festival.

Enjoy the letter.

yours JJ

John Jordan

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination,

Arz watershed

Morbihan

Breizh

Friday 15th June 2012

Dear  U.….

Why do I choose to write to you about Utopia in the form of a letter? Why not as a story (its common form – travelogue, science fiction etc), or manifesto (its explosive form – Surrealism, Situationism etc.) or as a blueprint (its most dangerous form – Fascism, Stalinism etc.)? Because letters (and I mean letters, written on paper, kissed by stamps, put in post boxes and taken from hand to hand across the land and seas) are like good Utopias, they exist in the spaces of uncertainty from which we learn and change.

Letters are written in the present – I sit here now, the sun’s rays flow through the window and I write to you. Yet you will read this somewhere else, at least a day later – and by the time you read it, these words will have become my past and yet are now your absolute present. Utopias like letters confuse time, they bring the future into the present and visa versa.

As I write, I picture you, but it’s an imagined you, an absent you. I’m writing to you there and yet also to myself here, these words are both dialogue and monologue. This letter is for the fantasy and the real you, for us together and us alone. Like utopias, letters confuse what is the imagined (the dream of what might be) with the real (what is), but most importantly they help us forget that we are apart. The greatest challenge of Utopia is surely the question of how can we live together and be free?

The Zapatistas, the masked indigenous rebels of Chiapas who against all odds are translating their dreams into everyday life, say “we are you”. Those three simple words help us to go beyond the idea of self and non self, of individual versus collective, they dissolve the great myth of our independence, our aloneness. Deeply embedded in the natural world, living within one of the most biodiverse ecosystems of the planet, the Zapatistas experience the complex interdependence of life daily, they literally eat and breathe the rich web of life that binds the forests together. They know that a tree cannot ‘be’ by itself alone. A tree cannot just ‘be’, neither can you or I just ‘be, we are and always have been interdependent, inter-beings.  You and I are deeply entwined with each other and this world, whether we like it or not. Everything is relationship.

Perhaps then, what I’m writing is a love letter – a love letter to Utopia.  Not to Utopia as a perfect place, nor to Utopia as macro solution to our systemic crisis  – but Utopia as an attitude and a way of life – not a big dream of the far future, but a nowtopia to be performed in the present. Not something to be imposed from above but experimented with from below. This is a letter to Utopias that begin with everyday acts – the specifics of the way we greet each other, the particularities of the way we grow our food, the way we constitute a group, the minute details in the way I touch you. Perhaps Utopia, like love, is simply the dare to allow the other to be truly free.

But I want to begin with a shadow, the dark trace of what is already here. I don’t have to tell you this is a moment of historical crisis. The problem is that it’s like nothing we’ve ever faced before – yet we’re facing it as if it’s just like everything else. The future is not what it used to be. Our Utopian imagination has atrophied in the asphyxiating atmosphere of apocalyptic predictions: a climate catastrophe, energy shortages, spreading social injustice, mass extinctions, economic meltdowns and looming resource wars.  It is a lot easier to imagine the world ending than changing for the better. But it is exactly when Utopia becomes unimaginable that it is most needed. Not as an escapist perfect Neverland, but as the constant wrench in the gut that reminds us that we do not have to accept the crumbs of the present. There is always somewhere else to go from here. Always. In fact there are as many destinations as there are imaginations.

Yet we hide our utopian dreams between the pages of beautiful books. We protect them from the harsh challenges of reality with soft lines of poetry. We make micro models of them walled inside art galleries safe from those who might not agree. We perform them in theatres where at the end, the curtain comes down and everyone goes back to business as usual. But in an emergency you do not play with Utopias, you do not pretend. Utopia is a practice of everyday life or nothing at all.

Perhaps we could call this practice Nowtopianism, the art of the future performed in the present, an art performed by all, not by the ego driven specialist artists, not as fiction that separates but action that connects. Nowtopianism is an art that embeds itself in our homes and offices, shapes our meetings and gatherings, suffuses our bedrooms and kitchens, designs our celebrations and resistance, organises our villages and cities. Ambitious in its courage to mould the mess of the social world yet committed to a human and local scale in its applications, As the great radical 19 c artists and activist William Morris wrote, such an art “will gather strength in simple places”, not just in “rich men’s houses”.

Nowtopianism will not be about turning our life into art, (and then displaying it in the palaces of culture) but about using the processes we are used to associating with art to transform the experience of everyday life itself. This art will no longer be seen as an end but a means, a way of doing things, a way of making our worlds with the same craft and pleasure that an artist applies to her work. Art will be the technique for reconstructing reality, not in a metaphoric way, but a hands-on practical way. The meal you eat for lunch will be as much a material for this practice as the way you next make love.

The key to practicing this art of everyday life will be paying deep attention to one’s daily activities, immersing ourselves in the act of doing so that like a dancer, every step, every breath and gesture is conscious and considered. Nothing will be automatic anymore, nothing is ‘just’ doing, everything is doing as best as we can, doing that generates pleasure within us and which is in the service of the life around us. The function of Nowtopianism is to bring maximum potential and connection to every situation, to open us up and bring us together. Rather than carelessly reproducing the rituals of money and power in the autopilot mode that consumerism encourages, Nowtopianism wakes us from the numbness, the anaesthetic hold of capital, it aestheticises life because it brings all our senses back from the dead.

To live a radically different life we need to change not only our way of thinking but also our body’s way of feeling. We need to train ourselves in new modes of perception, new sensibilities to the world that enables us to feel so disgusted by the dull familiar actions of daily life that reproduce capitalism that we are unable to carry them out anymore. A trip to the supermarket with its industrial toxic foods will feel like being a tourist in Auschwitz, taking a flight on a plane and pouring tonnes of CO 2 into the atmosphere will feel like we are dropping cluster bombs on the poor. Buying cheap clothes from H &M will feel like having child slaves crouching in the corner of our bedrooms. We need a new sensitivity where we become so shocked by the banal horrors of this system that puts economics ahead of life, that we are prepared to leave it, prepared to say goodbye. Perhaps this is a leaving letter not a love letter after all.

***

For over two decades, I lived in London, a city of 7 million, a monumental machine for the reproduction and expansion of capital. There I practiced what I called art activism, designing acts of creative resistance to open cracks so that postcapitalist life could emerge. These were not political performances, nor pictures of politics, but projects that applied creativity to radical politics itself. This involved working embedded as a creative organiser within social movements – from Reclaim the Streets to The alterglobalisation movement, from Climate Camp to local movements against gentrification – the movements became the canvas, the stage, the material. I was not interested in making art that illustrated the world’s problems, or performances inspired by radical politics or arty documentary films representing political struggle. The art was working with others within the movements to make its strategies, tools and protest tactics as beautiful and politically effective as possible. The aim was to make radical politics more sexy than capitalism, to make disobedience deeply desirable and the practice of alternative life irresistible.

Sometimes this involved choreographing crowds of thousands using different coloured masks in a mass carnival against capitalism that brought creative chaos to the financial centre of London. Sometimes this involved bringing artists and activists, engineers and bike fanatics together to collectively transform hundreds of abandoned bikes into tools of civil disobedience against a UN climate summit. Sometimes it was burying dozens of boats (with bottles of rum) in a forest, to be found using treasure maps and sailed in a rebel regatta down a river to shut down a coal fired power station. Sometimes it was inventing new forms of civil disobedience, such as the methodologies of the clown army that spread across the world and became part of the iconography of early 20c protest culture.

Means and ends were never separate. In this way the work was utopian, we were acting as if we were already free, creating the world we wanted in the present – every project worked without leaders or directors, we used horizontal forms of organising, decided things by consensus, tried to reduce our ecological impact on the world as much as possible and put pleasure before profit every time. But something was wrong. It felt that our life was a series of projects, of actions, short lived, never really feeling sustainable, never connecting to the whole of our life.

Living in a megapolis it was hard to re-sensitise our bodies, hard to refuse the draw of consumerism, hard to live every aspect of life as an ethical aesthetic act. London’s insane scale, it’s pervasive surveillance, it’s disconnection from natural systems other than human, its speed and over stimulation, it’s every rhythm dictated by the markets, meant that the cracks we opened soon closed up again.

Just as the first winds of the financial crisis were picking up in 2007 Isa (my partner) and I went on a journey through 11 European utopian communities. We experienced many worlds, from the temporary direct action Climate Camp set up illegally on the edges of Heathrow airport to a hamlet squatted by French art punks, occupied self-managed Serbian factories to a free love commune in an ex Stasi base, an Anarchist school to the 40 year old free town of Christiania, a village of precarious day labourers who had expropriated land from the local Duke to a permaculture settlement that lived off grid.

Out of that experience came a book-film, Paths Through Utopias. ( to be released in German, as Pfard durch Utopia with Nautilus in August 2012) We always knew that each word written for the book was also a step towards setting up our own utopia. By the time the last pages were drafted we desperately wanted to leave our London rhythm, unglue ourselves from our computers, and reboot our lives. We wanted more coherence, an everyday life entirely entwined with our politics. We wanted to consume less but make and grow more, to be more autonomous from the system and develop resilience for the economic and ecological shocks on the horizon. Although we had experienced so many communities doing this during our journey, it seemed impossible for us to make the leap. Where would we start, and how? Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we got a letter from a friend who had just found 16 acres of abandoned land in Brittany.

Now, 18 months later we’ve sold our flat, Isa has left her well paid university tenure and we have moved to Brittany where we are collectively buying the land. Its rolling fields and semi ruined farmhouse emanate abandonment, brambles have engulfed everything. But the site itself is only one part of the story. One of the most valuable aspects of the project is that three deeply rooted locals are on board. We are artists, farmers, teachers, mechanics, cooks and activists. The local networks of peasants activists already settled in this region and building new forms of production and exchange is strong: we definitely haven’t retreated to the countryside but have come to open up of another front against capital and for life.

Together, we are going to build a place where our abilities to explore postcapitalist ways of living will be nourished, and where tools of resilience and autonomy can be constructed and shared. Amidst an edible landscape, we will set up a laboratory of self managed education where the relationship between art, activism and ecology is explored, its founding question being: what would the Bauhaus or the Blackmountain college be like if it were founded in the  21^st century? There will be also be a workshop where people have access to tools and advice in order to build, mend or create – anything from cars to bikes, via wind turbines or machines of resistance. A mobile vegan field kitchen will be based there, together with a productive organic farm using horse drawn tools and Permaculture principles. Named La r.O.n.c.e, (meaning brambles in French) and standing for Resist, Organise, Nourish, Create, Exist it will not be a model, but a living experiment in the art of Nowtopianism. One that we hope will be as hard to get rid of as the brambles.

The sun has set, its time to stop writing, time to sleep and dream. One night when we were on our road trip, Isa and I promised to each other that we would never again live in a place where we could not see the stars. I look outside, the sky is full, I breathe the fresh cold air deep into my lungs. I wonder if you look outside now whether you can see the stars, I hope so. If not your will always be welcome to pass by here on your way to utopia…

Love JJ xx