As promised, we’re launching today the website for UNCIVILISATION, the Dark Mountain festival. You can find it here. We’re also now putting on sale the main batch of tickets. There are various combinations to choose from.

We’ll be updating the site as the programme settles into its final shape.

What is this about? Well, on one level it’s a simple festival, of the kind we’re all familiar with. We’ll be staging talks, debates and readings, holding workshops, showing films and giving over evenings to music. There’ll be walks and expeditions, and all of these things will feature the best people we can find of their kind. We hope they’ll stimulate, entertain and provoke. What holds them together is a focus on taking the themes of the manifesto and the the Project and running with them, in all and any directions.

But the more I think about it, the more I understand that the festival is – has to be – more than this as well. I’ve been to plenty of festivals in my time, and performed at some myself. They vary in quality, but what they have in common is that they are largely consumer experiences. You pay your money, you come along, and if you’re lucky you have a good time.

If this is all that UNCIVILISATION provides, then to me it will have been a failure, even if an entertaining one. To me this is about gathering together a group of people who are united , or at least stimulated, by a common project, and seeing how they – we – shape it. It needs to be about participation as well as consumption. We hope the menu we provide will stimulate your appetite, but we hope too that you’ll bring your own ingredients.

On that note, we have spaces left in the programme to be taken up by willing mountaineers. If you have any ideas for workshops, talks, demonstrations, discussions, collective endeavours, schemes, experiments or anything else, please get in touch. Outside the programme, we’ll be providing spaces all weekend for the continuation of conversations, for plans and for meetings.

I suppose what I am getting at is that the festival is a joint enterprise. It will stand or fall on the energy we all bring, and the conversations we have. I hope that afterwards that energy will feed into this website, and our next journal, and will hopefully also stimulate other Dark Mountain projects and activities that haven’t even been thought of yet.

None of which is to say that there will not be good beer and even better music also. Oh, there will! Come and take part. Fill in the maps with us.

Posted by Paul Kingsnorth. Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 5:32 pm.