The book is organized around several questions that are not ours alone, but are those the struggles themselves gave rise to and try to keep alive. ‘Our era is stingy when it comes to struggles’, a TAV opponent told us, and these two spaces – Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the Susa Valley – indeed represent a radical rupture with the fastidious course taken by two societies at peace. Over and above what they have in common – from their massive oppositions to infrastructural projects to their obstinacy in embodying revolt and resistance now, in the present – what unites them here is the way that the two movements, via a thousand different ways of telling their stories, speak to each other and interrogate each other at the same time. On the one hand, a popular struggle has defined the life of an Italian valley of 70,000 inhabitants for over twenty years. On the other, the zad: a 1,650 hectare bocage that, having freed itself from all signs of control of the French State, has become the outline of an autonomous territory, the beginnings of a free commune.
Peoples
Eyebrows contract, faces take on a questioning look. In the midst of a discussion, one of those harsh, explosive words that command everybody’s attention has been spoken. In French, the term ‘the people’ can barely be pronounced, burdened as it is with associations from the past, vices that have accompanied its political use: nationalism, Stalinism, and so on.
At the zad, we are timidly beginning to use the adjective ‘popular’, by dint of finding ourselves regularly filling up the roadways with crowds of demonstrators and hundreds of tractors. We don’t go so far as to put it on banners or use it in pamphlet titles, but more and more the idea is floating around. Like a slow, minute re-appropriation, an inspiration. In the Susa Valley, they say: ‘The NoTAV struggle is a popular struggle.’ There, it is obvious, no one would say otherwise. There are popular committees, popular meals, and popular marches. We were present at the last one: tens of thousands of demonstrators from Bussoleno to Susa, one more time. So many giant processions have snaked their way through the valley that they couldn’t be counted. On those marches were retired people, school children, unemployed, and firemen. Flags hung in windows, people marched according to their trade, their village committee, their political affinity, all in the ambiance of a village fair. Giacu, the totemic puppet, laced through the crowd and ridiculed a group of mayors, looking a bit awkward in their tricolour scarves. All this speaks to us directly, since it is a dimension of things we are not familiar with. It is perhaps here, somewhere between a territory and a politics, that the NoTAV people has come into being, rich with a common culture and fundamentally open to others.
Out of this popular dimension the power of the movement is generated. On the village billboard, a whole palimpsest of events can be uncovered: breakfast by the work-yard gates, an evening of support for prisoners, a discussion about mountain agriculture, a concert by a Turin rap group … this isn’t the monthly schedule but rather the weekly one. NoTAV is social life, each day there is something to do, a place to meet up. The valley is peopled with a force and a soul in combat.
Territories
Living in the zad is not the same as lodging. ‘Zone d’Aménagement Différé’, or Zone of Deferred Management, is a management acronym – it says nothing about what is lived here, no more than do terms like ‘wetlands’, or ‘lawless zone’. To distinguish ourselves from this programmed, formatted language, we go in search of animals and plants with fabulous names: great crested newt, grand Capricorn, ribbon-leaved water plantain. We pass through the doorways of cabins made of sheet iron and palettes, or of a solid wood frame, each made out of determination and dreams. There are dozens of these living spaces, cohabiting with conventional farmhouses and buildings, those of the inhabitants and farmers who ceded nothing. There is no airport here because the place is taken. And by being occupied it engenders a world. A world where we get our bread every Friday at the ‘non-market’, where we meet up Thursday evenings at the Wardine, and where assemblies decide to barricade all the roadways in the area to prevent a judge from coming in. Everyday life here is intricately merged with struggle. Some 200 people, maybe more, maybe less, live here – what does it matter? Population surveys have evaporated in the kind of life being designed here day after day. Thousands of others join us depending on what is going on. New arrivals have to first put on their boots, to walk paths where your feet sink into the mud. Walking through the bocage, it transmits to us a little of the magic of something that persists. It is not immediately noticeable, but little by little, a difference with the rest of the surrounding region can be detected: the fields and the meadows here are smaller, bordered by hedges and paths while elsewhere agriculture management and redistricting has triumphed. Something persists, too, in the words of a retired farmer: he mischievously tells us that the suppression of the communal lands was not accomplished without resistance, and that by an accident of history, the commune of Notre-Dame-des-Landes was founded in the course of the illustrious year of 1871. He evokes a past that links together easily with present subversions. He continues, enlarging the geography: in a radius of 30 kilometres from here, we can find the sites of the ex-projects for nuclear stations at Pellerin and Carnet – ‘ex’, because the struggles there were victorious. Next, he ticks off the highpoints in the history of peasant struggles of the last century: Vigne Marou, Couëron, Cheix-en-Retz, and so forth. The territory of the zad, ardently defended against all incursions from the forces of order or bulldozers, remains open to the four winds of struggle: past, present, and those to come.
When, having climbed up the Montgenevre pass, you enter the Susa Valley, no boundary marks the transition. From Salbertrand to Avigliana a subterranean valley extends that is invisible on any Italian survey map: the NoTAV valley. A territory, that while maintaining a fusion with the mountain land, has managed to exceed any set of physical boundaries. Those who come to meet it with sincerity are welcomed, and, well outside of Turin, NoTAV insinuates itself inside the best guarded prisons in Italy. A territory both real and imagined, it exceeds the limits of political conflict: ‘NoTAVs came to help me when the wind tore my roof off’, ‘we are going to the funerals with flags when the families ask us to’. There is a community that lives in the space and that gives to the term territory a vertiginous fullness.
Composition
Exploring the extent and scale of these movements cannot be done in a day. We ran into semi-punk naturalists and former railway workers, tenacious farmers and ski instructors, young runaway-squatters and radical women militants from the neighbouring city. We shared a little of the lives of those who are not waiting for a better tomorrow, but who throw themselves, with no railings or safety nets, into the boiling alchemy of the struggle. This is the place where that which comes together is everything that elsewhere is kept carefully apart. How can it seem to hold together? By what magic? NoTAVs like meetings, hundreds of them can be found in the Bussoleno festivals or on an occupied motorway. An old white-haired woman takes the microphone, she climbs up on the central platform so that she can be seen and heard. She is the owner of a chalet who has just been evicted, she begins at the beginning: why they built it there where the construction was supposed to begin, what their aims were, how it all got underway. Everyone listens, even those who are most on top of the situation. She is not trying to inform, she is telling a story, once again, the very real epic saga they are all pursuing together. She takes time for anecdotes and details, even though in this crowd, there is not anyone who has not heard them before. She traces the contours of a common narrative that, patiently, opens a pathway to understanding and to decisions made together. Listening and sharing are vital for keeping together the imperative mandates of political organizations and the azimuth spontaneity of affinity groups that blend into the movement. Something is being invented here on a patch of asphalt, something like a capacity to decide, at the level of gestures and practices, that is the opposite of representation and delegation. A few days later, on the same motorway, now reopened to traffic at 80 miles an hour, a friend unfolds