Chicanes is a series of photographs taken from 2013 to 2016 by Elisa Larvego, in the ZAD (zone to defend) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The images show chicanes, emblematic constructions of the Zadists' struggle, used to disrupt traffic on the departmental road and to monitor the passage of the police. This publication comes five years after the abandonment of the airport project by the French government but also five years after the very violent expulsions of many inhabitants of the ZAD, as well as the destruction of the chicanes. These images are a testimony and a trace of this fight to safeguard a territory as well as its environment, and to lead a life outside of norms.

In an interview conducted by Elisa Larvego and Joerg Baer, ​​the philosopher Marie-José Mondzain talks about her relationship to these images and this testimony.

“This series by Elisa Larvego on chicanes is very important, because it is the trace of something – of an event – ​​whose power wishes to be forgotten or disappeared. These images are the memory, the testimony of what must be erased: the resistance of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The Chicanes series touched me a lot, on several levels. Already, I am struck by the ambivalences of the word itself, which is both, in French, the zigzag of deceleration and the designation of a disagreement, even a conflict marked by a certain bad faith. » (extract from the interview)