Jay Jordan
Jay (formerly John) Jordan or JJ (they/them) is labelled a "Domestic Extremist" by the UK police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the French press. JJ has spent three decades applying what they learnt from theatre and performance art to direct action.
They like spaces betwixt and between of all sorts, especially between art and activism, culture and "nature", the masculine and feminine, protest and proposition. They have performed in museums and International Theater Festivals, trained people in squats, co-organised climate camps, choreographed carnivalesque riots, written a BBC radio play for today, and an opera-for-one. Author, art activist, part-time sex worker and full time trouble maker, JJ inhabits the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, with Isa, and co facilitates the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.
As a teenager, JJ spent their time making super 8 films and developing photographs in a darkroom, by the 1980’s they were making performance art, in the tradition of body art, often causing UK tabloid press outrage. The nineties were filled with becoming a father, a seven year project exploring masculinity and its relationship to pornography (via art, TV chat show interventions and therapy) and being Co-director of London’s Joseph Beuys inspired artivism organisation Platform (1987 to 1994).
They left Platform after discovering the joy of direct-action and went on to co-found the anti-capitalist rave and direct action collective Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000). In 2004 JJ co-launched the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, which became a global protest meme (2004- ) but from which they soon went AWOL, when realising it was an aesthetic crime.
Around the same time they deserted their job as senior lecturer in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University, to work as a cameraman for Naomi Klein’s film The Take, shot during the Argentinian uprising. They continue to teach and lecture part time for various institutions ranging from the Berlin’s UDK art school, the Scottish Royal Conservatoire, to the CTM music festival.
They co-edited and co-authored We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism (Verso, 2003), The User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible (with Gavin Grindon, Minor Compositions, 2009), the film/book Les Sentiers de l’Utopie (with Isabelle Fremeaux, Zones/La Découverte, 2011) and We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (with Isabelle Fremeaux, Vagabonds/Pluto/Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2021). (2023)
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