Last year, after the first Uncivilisation festival/experiment, it took the festival’s organising team about six months to recover. It wasn’t until the end of 2010 that we could bear to even think about whether, or how, to do another festival. We got there in the end, but it took us a while to gird ourselves and regather our energies.

This year is different. The energy that has flowed out of this year’s festival, and is beginning to gather in all sorts of wonderful and unexpected places, is really exciting to see. To me, it feels as if the Dark Mountain Project is now starting to genuinely become what we’ve long  hoped it would: a real movement, a many-headed hydra, fanning out from the words in the manifesto to occupy crevices all across the cultural landscape.

So this year we’re going to strike while the iron is hot, and announce the time and place of next year’s festival. Uncivilisation 2012 will take place on the same weekend, and in the same location, as this year’s event. That is, at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire, on the weekend of 17th – 19th August 2012.

It’s early days yet, but we’re already planning a few changes for next year, designed mainly to widen out the curatorial responsibilities of the event. We’ve had two years in which the project’s two founders have laid out the agenda, and now it’s time to invite others to do so as well. There will be more on exactly how we plan to do this later in the year.

One thing we already know that we plan to do, though, is hold open a specific area of the festival site as an open, uncurated space.  There will be outdoor space available, and an indoor space too, similar to this year’s Free Space tent, and this section of the festival will be completely open and unplanned. What happens in it will depend on what festival goers bring along. They – you – might choose to bring a talk, a reading, an art exhibition, a show, a lecture … it’s nothing to do with us. We just plan to stand back and see what happens.

We’ve been inspired here by the approach that governs the Burning Man Festival in the US, which a number of people have been talking about for a while over on the DM network. Have a look here at how that approach works. We won’t be running the whole festival this way – just a part of it – but if it comes off, who knows what might happen next time? We’ll put together a loose set of principles which people will be expected to abide by in this uncurated space – a broad sympathy with DM’s aims and manifesto, for example, a ban on hate speech and the like – but beyond that, it’s up to you.

This isn’t the only way in which the organisation of the festival will differ from this year, but we’ll announce some more details towards the end of the year when we have pinned some of them down! I wanted to open this proposal out now so that anyone thinking of putting something together for the festival could start thinking about it. It’s never too early. That’s what we seem to have convinced ourselves, anyway.

Tickets for next year’s festival will go on sale in the new year, and we hope there’ll be more places available than this year. As ever, we’re open to ideas about things that could happen at Unciv 2012, and we’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts on that.

For now though – save the date!

Posted by Paul Kingsnorth. Friday, September 16th, 2011 at 8:36 pm.