This Friday, January 22nd, at dawn, people decided to blockade the road passing through the middle of the construction site for the new Eurorennes train station and in front of the women’s prisons’ main entrance.
Bins were overturned, oil spilled and the following text plastered on the jail walls and site fences:
This morning, we’re blocking this road with help from some bins tipped over and spilled oil…
Because “the city of tomorrow”, wedged between the business district’s megalomaniac construction site that is Euro-Rennes, its future LGV high-speed rail and Europe’s largest women’s prison, represents itself exactly as dreamt up in the offices of Rennes Métropole’s project.
Because we don’t have the same dreams.
Because a few minutes of congestion will always be derisory compared to the hours, months and years spent in cages. That these few minutes enable anyone to lift their head from their daily routine and realise it.
Because it makes us laugh when we imagine a prison guard having a hard time going home after spending the night locking people up, or a yuppie missing their €120 TGV for their business meeting in Paris.
Because on the other side of this road Euro-Rennes kick out the poor to build hotels, offices, alternative cinemas, lofts and trendy bars. That the computer-generated images, which flourish on the neighbourhood’s giant billboards, give an idea of the population on the make: young suited tie-wearers, very white, very rich, hurriedly walking on the slick walkways.
Because they want the whole city to resemble this, and this makes us puke.
This morning, we’re blocking this road.
Because only a few kilometres from here, at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the State and Vinci want to build an airport. They’ve decided to evict those who oppose it today, as tomorrow – with their planes and runways – they intend to evict those who don’t have the right papers.
Because the State everywhere imposes its projects by money, cops and media propaganda, always crushing the poorest and undesirables in the process. With the state of emergency, it gives itself the means to again unleash a little more.
Because right now, loads of people are mobilising against the airport and its world, multiplying the actions, and we want to contribute. It is possible to fight, everywhere and directly, in different ways, as a few or as many, against these institutional structures and these companies that spoil our lives.
Because this world that they’re building isn’t ours, and we don’t intend to let them do so.
Because we’re incompatibles, our desires are turned into disorder against them, and we don’t let go!
We prefer a thousand times over a lively neighbourhood where we meet, we give each other a helping hand and we sound off with neighbours on a scrap of wild wasteland over a bbq; to a parade of wheeled suitcases dragging their suits on the video-surveilled tarmac.
We prefer a thousand times over spaces where we’re experimenting with ways of living, residing, feeding ourselves, fighting and relating with one another differently; to the prospect of control towers, vast eco-labelled hangars and their gantry vigipirates.
Against the airport and its world, its LGV and its jail.
[via Contra Info from Nantes Indymedia, January 22nd]
Helsinki, Finland: Black greetings to the French government
18.1 – 24.1.2016: Loads of JCDecaux bus stops along one of the busiest roads in Helsinki were painted with ZAD slogans.
We want to express our solidarity to the defenders of the ZAD and also our indignation towards the French media that is spreading anti-ZAD propaganda.
There won’t be an airport!
[via Contra Info, January 25th]
