The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during the Copenhagen climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture and falling in love with utopias, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) exists somewhere between art and activism, poetry and politics. We are not an institution or a group, not a network nor an NGO, but an affinity of friends who recognise the beauty of collective creative disobedience. We treat insurrection as an art and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection.

Creation and resistance are the entwined DNA strands of our practice. We see art and activism as inseparable from everyday life. Our experiments aim not to make art but to shape reality, not to show you the world but to change it together. We champion artists who escape the prisons of the art world, who stop playing the fool in the corporate palaces and apply their creativity directly to the engineering of social movements. We befriend activists who value their imaginations listen to dreams and play with the political as they would stanzas of a poem.

At the heart of our experiments lie new ways of relating to each other and organising ourselves: working without hierarchy, taking direct action, practicing self management and living ecologically, we refuse to wait for the end of capitalism, but attempt to live in spite of it.

“This isn’t a normal traveling theatre company you know!” Scotland Yard.

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