Projects

Putting ideas into practice, creating organisations, publishing books, hosting events and bringing people into collaboration.

Four times, I’ve had the luck to take an idea on the journey from the earliest spark of possibility to the practical responsibilities of organisational existence.

School of Everything was an internet startup which I co-founded in 2006, inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and the educational experiments of the 1960s.

In 2009, I founded Spacemakers, which grew from a meet-up group to an agency whose projects bring people together to reimagine the places where we live and work. Our first major project was the revival of Brixton Village indoor market, but the project I’m proudest of is the West Norwood Feast, a community-owned and run street-market. In 2012, I handed on the running of Spacemakers to a team led by Matt Weston.

Also in 2009, Paul Kingsnorth and I published Uncivilisation, the manifesto that started the Dark Mountain Project. This became the anchor of my work over the next ten years. In 2019, after fifteen books, five festivals and numerous other collaborations, I handed on my responsibilities to Charlotte Du Cann, Nick Hunt and colleagues who are taking Dark Mountain into its second decade.

In 2018, Anna Björkman and I set out on the slow process of creating a school called HOME: a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

The posts below introduce many of the smaller and larger projects for which I have been responsible, within or alongside the work of these organisations.

Homeward Bound

The first online offering from a school called HOME was this eight-week series that I taught over Zoom.

The Great Humbling

A slow-paced, conversational podcast in which Ed Gillespie and I ask what it means to be humbled – and whether this might be a good frame for making sense of the times we’re living in.

Notes From Underground

An essay series and podcast for Bella Caledonia exploring the deep context of the new climate movements.

a school called HOME

In 2018, Anna and I set out on the long-term project of creating a school, a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

Where the Words Run Out

For AHA! festival in Gothenburg, Alexander Dam, Sara Rousta and I created this performance for two dancers and a writer running out of words.

Medan klockan tickar

A play commissioned by the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm about what it’s like when the Anthropocene is your day job. Co-written with Anders Duus, Nina Tersmann & Jesper Weithz.

The Dark Mountain Workshop (2015-16)

What does art do when the world is on fire? In the autumn of 2015, I brought together a group of fourteen artists from within and beyond the performing arts. The Dark Mountain Workshop was part of my role as leader of audience and artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre. We met for…

The Crossing of Two Lines

This book is a document of the work of Robert and Geska Brečević (aka Performing Pictures), but also an enquiry into the discomfort it has caused among their art-world contemporaries.

Despatches from the Invisible Revolution

Keith Kahn Harris and I edited this collection of personal despatches from the events of 2011, the year when it seemed to be ‘kicking off everywhere’.

Uncivilisation Festival (2010-14)

During the early years of Dark Mountain, we ran an annual three-day festival with writers, makers and performers who had been drawn to the project.

COMMONSense

A small book about the commons made in collaboration with the artist Anne-Marie Culhane and members of the Access Space media lab in Sheffield.