Full Metal Yellow Jacket

<p>An unknown but familiar territory has begun to take on a political existence. The yellow vests have situated themselves in a peripheral space made up of non-places: roundabouts, motorway tolls, shopping center parking lots – the same circulatory axes along which the atomized functions to which neo-urbanites are consigned are organized and distributed. This daily environment of millions of people stuck in early morning and late afternoon traffic jams seemed to have neutralized any possibility of an event. Statistics suggest that half of the French population lives in this periphery. All of these people had been desperately invisible…in order to exist, they had to put on a yellow vest, just as others had needed a balaclava or a black North Face jacket… The fact that the Adama Traoré committee was so quick to call for people to join the yellow vest rallies in Paris is a case in point: Beaumontsur-Oise, the border point between the Parisian suburbs and what was once the Parisian countryside, embodies precisely this periphery of the metropolis that has taken on a political existence (in this case since the murder of Adama Traoré) and does not intend to give it up.</p>