Dark Mountain mini-festival at Union Street Urban Orchard

Join us this August for a one-day mini-festival of Dark Mountain discussions, workshops, readings and music in the Union Street Urban Orchard. This free event will be a chance to pick up where UNCIVILISATION left off and to weave other threads into the conversation.

After all the talks, debates and performances in Llangollen, we're keen to open things up and make more room for the informal, the impromptu and the small scale. So we invite you to take part in an afternoon which will mix Open Space sessions with unplugged music, open mic sessions and a bring & share dinner.

We'll be joined by contributors to Dark Mountain: Issue 1 and some of the speakers and performers from UNCIVILISATION, but anyone will be able to offer a discussion, workshop or talk, making use of spaces around the orchard.

It's a chance to explore further the questions raised by the manifesto and responses to it:

- what does the future look like, once we stop pretending it will be "an upgraded version of the present"?
- how do we unweave the myths of progress, civilisation vs barbarism, and our separation from nature?
- how do we adjust to a depleted world - and what is the role of the imagination in this adjustment?
- how can artists respond to an age of ecocide?

Bring your own questions, ideas, stories, creations, props and instruments.

Here's our rough plan of events:

3pm - Introduction from Paul and Dougald, followed by first opportunity to offer sessions for the afternoon
3.30-6pm - Sessions 1 & 2 (four spaces available around the orchard) with music breaks…
6-7pm - Bring & share dinner plus open mic music session
7-7.45pm - Session 3
7.45-9pm - music
9pm onwards - after party…

We're grateful to the people of the Union Street Orchard for inviting us to run this event. Following the London Festival of Architecture and lasting through the autumn, the site of 100 Union Street in SE1 has been transformed into an urban orchard and community garden. Designed by Heather Ring of the Wayward Plant Registry for The Architecture Foundation and built with the help of the Bankside Open Spaces Trust, LivingARK and over 100 other helpful volunteers the gardens have regenerated a disused site in Bankside and created a place for exchange between local residents and visitors.

The nearest tube stations to the orchard are Southwark, Borough and London Bridge.