Gathering Places

It may have started online and in the pages of books, but Dark Mountain came alive through the many different shaped gatherings that sprang up around the project.

From the early Uncivilisation festivals, to firelight storytelling in the shadow of a shut-down art college in South Yorkshire, or the strange figures weaving through the city of Reading on a Saturday night – from the cellars of a theatre in Stockholm to mountainous retreats in the Spanish Pyrenees – the connections formed through these encounters have led in a hundred directions, travelling off the edge of our maps, or feeding back into the pages of future Dark Mountain books.

In this section, we’ve drawn together the traces into the beginnings of a history of Dark Mountain as a place where people gather. Meanwhile, you can find listings for upcoming gatherings on our Events page – or sign up to our newsletter for future announcements.

If you’ve ever organised a DIY event, you’ll know that all the good intentions about documenting with photographs and video have a tendency to fall away amid the work of holding the show together. So we’re hugely grateful to friends of Dark Mountain who have been generous in photographing our activities over the years – and in particular to Andy Broomfield and Bridget McKenzie, without whose efforts the photographic archive of this project would be very sparse.

We are always glad to hear from people with photographs and recordings of our past events, so if you have anything to add to this archive, please get in touch.