MEG X Alternatiba Léman - Book talk with Fatima Ouassak: "Rue du Passage".

MEG, in collaboration with Alternatiba Léman, welcomes Fatima Ouassak, political scientist, author and activist, to the temporary exhibition "Mémoires. Geneva in the colonial world". She will be talking about the concept of pirate ecology and her latest book, Rue du Passage.

The discussion will focus on pirate ecology, because what we lack in Europe today is an ecology project initiated in working-class neighbourhoods, which would articulate both the rootedness in the land and the freedom of movement. A project that looks to the Global South and aims to build a broad internationalist front against global warming and the destruction of life itself. A project that would set its sights on land liberation, animal liberation and equal human dignity, all of which are fundamentally linked. A project that embraces secession in the face of increasingly threatening far-right forces.
Fatima will also be presenting her latest book, "Rue du Passage", in which, through the eyes of a child from the 1980s, we learn about a world that has remained on the margins of history and sociology: the immigrant working class. Rue du Passage celebrates the men and women who acted as smugglers, whose work enabled exiles to form a community, survive and pass on their knowledge and resistance.

Speakers:

• Fatima Ouassak: Fatima Ouassak is an author, political scientist and activist. She is known for her commitment to the environment, feminism and anti-racism. In 2016, she co-founded Front de mères, the first parents' union in working-class neighbourhoods. In 2020, she published her first essay, La Puissance des mères, pour un nouveau sujet révolutionnaire. Following on from this project, she and Alternatiba are behind the opening of Verdragon, the first house dedicated to popular ecology, in 2021. In March 2023, Fatima Ouassak published Pour une écologie pirate : Et nous serons libres (For a Pirate Ecology: And We Shall Be Free), in which she examines the need to broaden the social ecological front and calls for a rethink of the role of people living in working-class neighbourhoods in these struggles. Rue du Passage", her latest novel, is a history of the immigrant working class, through portraits of workers from immigrant backgrounds, seen through the eyes of a child.
• Moderation: Morgane Nusbaumer, co-president of Alternatiba Léman.

As part of and in collaboration with Alternatiba Léman.