Festival

UNCIVILISATION 2011 takes place 19-21 August at The Sustainability Centre, Hampshire.

Book your tickets here.

How do we make sense of our lives in a time of disruption and contraction? Where are the stories - old or new - that help us reground ourselves? Faced with the loss of much we took for granted, where are the practical projects that offer hope and meaning for the times ahead?

This year’s Dark Mountain festival will be a gathering of people searching for answers to these questions. For one weekend this August, a temporary village will spring up in the Hampshire countryside.

Drawing on the strengths of last year’s event in Llangollen, it will be a place of encounters and conversations, learning and sharing, stories, ideas, music and performance. There will also be campfires, wanderings in the woods, children’s activities, and workshops in everything from writing to scything.

Among the musicians already lined up to play, we have Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Chris T-T, Marmaduke Dando, The General Assembly, Bill Harbottle and Allie Stewart.

Talks, workshops and activities will include:

• Jay Griffiths and friends from the West Papua Campaign;
• revisiting the Luddites, 200 years on, with Warren Draper and Dougald Hine; 
• the poets Mario Petrucci, Melanie Challenger, Em Strang & Adrienne Odasso; 
• Vinay Gupta on parallel infrastructures for an uncertain future; 
• land-based strategies with coppicer, straw-bale builder and drystone waller Hywel Lewis; 
• comparing crashes: discussing the lived experience of economic crisis with speakers from Ireland, Iceland and the US; 
• the future of publishing with Sharon Blackie, Two Ravens Press; 
• wild food foraging expeditions with Andy Hamilton and Fergus Drennan; 
• writing workshops with authors including Nick Hunt; 
• the symbolism of the scythe with Paul Kingsnorth; 
• a walk and talk with Adam Weymouth, exploring the idea of pilgrimage.

Look out for announcements of further speakers and performers over the weeks ahead.

UNCIVILISATION 2011 will be a more outdoor experience than last year’s festival, but we will also have four covered spaces: a performance space, a writing space, a practical space and an open space where anyone can offer sessions. There will also be open sing-arounds, so bring your own musical instruments.

And we’re working with the Sustainability Centre’s own cafe and local suppliers to ensure locally-sourced food and drink for the weekend.