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<\/a>\n \n \n The lighthouse at full moon\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n Some of the hundreds of builders\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n The raising of the pylon\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n A 5 month long skill share\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n Climbing skills for everyone\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n Building the cabin\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n Our genius cruise ship building welder\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n Building against the clock\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n Many folk learnt to weld\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n The poster for the opening\n <\/small><\/p><\/div> \n \n The lighting for the opening performance\n <\/small><\/p><\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/p>\n On the zad of Notre Dame des Landes<\/a>, in Brittany, stands a disobedient lighthouse. It was built far from the sea, exactly where the control tower of a new international airport was supposed to be built and was one of the many creative acts of resistance that led to the abandonment of the infernal infrastructure project in 2018. It was constructed over 5 months\u00a0 by a ragged crew \u2013 including deserting architects, an ex-homeless kid, art activists, a ceramicist, a few farmers and a genius welder whose day job was building the world\u2019s biggest cruise-liners in France\u2019s largest shipyard.<\/p>\n In January 2016 all legal procedures countering the airport project had run their course and construction was given the green light. Manuel Valls, ex-Interior Minister who had to pull back his troops from the zad in 2012, was now Prime Minister. \u201cThe government will not give in to intimidations by a minority of individuals, the laws of the republic will be applied to Notre-Dame-des-Landes like everywhere else\u201d he asserted regularly in parliament: the construction would begin as soon as everyone was evicted.<\/p>\n The movement responded with a series of actions, ranging from 60,000 people dancing on a motorway to 40,000 people, in a ritual disguised as a demonstration,<\/a> bringing staffs and sticks and planting them in the ground pledging to return to get them if the government came to evict. In the Autumn, just when the state was due to arrive with their bulldozers,\u00a0 the construction of a big fuck off finger to the authorities began. On the very site where the airport control tower was planned, at la Rolandi\u00e8re,\u00a0 a full scale 20m high fully working lighthouse began to take shape, to welcome the world to port.<\/p>\n We inhaled inspiration from rebel towers across time. Vladimir Tatlin<\/a>\u2019s never built 1919 vision of a 400 meter tall twisting helix-like monument to the communist international brought ambition. We drew doggedness from the 60 meter high metal vertical barricade built at Narita<\/a> in 1972 by farmers, students and activists to block planes taking off from the fiercely contested Tokyo international airport. From Dolly, a 30 meter crazed jumble of stolen scaffolding with a techno sound system at its summit and rising out of a row of 45 houses squatted against the building of the M11 Link road in east london<\/a> in 1994, we acquired audacity.<\/p>\n An archetype of hope and haven, lighthouses are ancient tools for caring for lives and a form of commons: their light is freely given to every ship to navigate safely through the night. Resisting wave and wind, stretching between sky and earth, lighthouses emerge out of the darkness just when you think you\u2019re lost and long for home. Made from a cut down electricity pylon given to us by a farmer, our lighthouse is tied by a ship-like gangway to the library in a nod to the mythical city of Alexandria, that melting pot of sailors, traders and alchemists, with its great library and lighthouse. A combined symbol of confidence and tool of resistance, it became the new, higher, pirate radio station antenna, and on its top was a siren that could be controlled from a mobile telephone to be set off in case of evictions. And if cops did come, we would lock ourselves to the metallic structure making it difficult for them to reach us.<\/p>\n Historian Kristin Ross named the zad\u2019s lighthouse as an act of \u201cCommunal Luxury\u201d.<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cCommunal Luxury\u201d\u00a0 is a phrase that comes from the manifesto of the radical Federation of Artists, of the Paris Commune of 1871, which proposed that luxury was not the private accumulation of stuff, but the flourishing of beauty in all shared spaces. As the geographer Elis\u00e9e Reclus wrote, \u201cif the painters and sculptors were free, there would be no need for them to shut themselves up in Salons\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/labo.zone\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/20161113_154536-scaled.jpg\")
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