Against the Airport and its World: The ZAD and Frontiers

Abstract

The international airport is the quintessence of globalized free-market capitalism: there, the conquering of distances, fluid circulation of people and goods, advertising and consumption of products, all come together in a continuous globalized spatial network covering the earth. It is the epitome of the built, contained, climatized, homogenized, and controlled environment: at antipodes, then, with ‘nature,’ in the form of organically established ecologies. When farmers and activists stopped the building of a new international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France last year, the slogan of their movement was “Against the airport and its world.” In this paper, I will examine and compare recent representations of the ‘counter-world’ the ZAD proposes in place of the airport (world-)system—as we find them in essays published in the anthology Éloge des mauvaises herbes: ce que nous devons à la ZAD (2018, including essays by David Graeber, Bruno Latour, and Virginie Despentes) and graphic novels (Pignocchi, 2019; and Azuélos and Rochepeau, 2019)—in order to evaluate to what extent the experimental ecology of the ZAD can give rise to discourses and aesthetics articulating anything ‘other’ than the ubiquitously reproduced logics of the ‘airport,’ which is to say of globalized capitalism itself.