BOOK LAUNCH and FILM SHOW RECORDINGS
Since the pandemic in 2020 our Dark Mountain book launches have been held online and video recordings posted soon afterwards,. Here you can view them all in.one place, so do browse at your leisure!
The shows run approximately for 90 minutes and include introductions to the book by the issues’ editors and producers, readings of prose and poetry by the contributors, a slideshow of the artworks, music, film clips and Q & A’s with the audience.
You can find more information about the books and their editorial teams and contributors as well as how to buy copies in our online shop. All issues celebrated here are presently in stock. https://dark-mountain.net/shop/
Waiting in the Dark
In November 2020 we also ran an online screening of short films called The Picture Show at the End of the World that had been originally scheduled for a spring gathering in The Cube cinema in Bristol (then postponed). Hosted by filmmaker Jonny Randall, you can read the background and call out to this series in a post here and his response to some of the submissions here.
Thank you for watching and listening!
If you have any queries regarding Dark Mountain films or these videos do get in touch with our film editor Jonny Randall at info@dark-mountain.net. We hope to add video interviews from our archive soon.
Conversations at the End of the World with Dougald Hine and Andrew Boyd
On 15th June 2023 we hosted a conversation between the authors of two very different approaches to the climate crisis, At Work in the Ruins and I Want a Better Catastrophe. Both books spring from a epiphany that the current framing the crisis as a problem for science or activism to fix, in no way helps us to navigate the predicament that the world and ourselves are in. This wide ranging dialogue with Dougald and Andrew revolves around the question of how we can find our bearings in a time of collapse, how we can ‘stay with the trouble’ and build a culture that can hold complexity and paradox, alongside the key role conversation plays in these shared ‘small path’ ways of being. Also contains readings from the books.
In the future we hope to host other conversations, so do watch this space!
Conversations at the End of the World from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
Spring 2023: Issue 23 – Dark Kitchen
Dark Mountain: Issue 23 – Dark Kitchen is a feast of stories, poetry and artwork that explore food in a time of converging ecological crises – from the devouring agricultural machine to the restorative fermenting jar.
Dark Kitchen is based on our online series that set out to document the regenerative acts of resistance happening in kitchens and fields around the world. In this book, we taste the sweet and salt, the sour and the bitter. We look deep into the belly of the beast: into the factories of ultra-processed food; into the slaughterhouse knocker box; at starvation on the Arctic sea ice; in an elite dining room where endangered animals are on the menu.
But among the clatter of our pans, we also remember the connections that nourish the living world: the wild salmon of the Atlantic and Pacific that feed the forests; the seaweed that creates a garden on a Hebridean island; the microbes that link the wild yeasts in Montana to the whiskered wheat of East Anglia to the sourdough loaves that feed a locked-down hill community in Australia. Food that makes sense of everything, even as the civilised world falls apart.
Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 23 – Dark Kitchen from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
Autumn 2022: Issue 22 –ARK
What do you keep when the storm comes in, and the tide goes out?
Our latest special issue is an ARK you might not expect. Its pages carry a cargo of another sort: stories gathered from the wreckage left by a flood that has already come, art and writing that reveal the beauty, resilience and strength found in being fully alive in a troubled time. Our seeds are collected from felled trees and activist frontlines; our disappearing creatures discovered in dreams, our artworks made with ochres from a polluted shoreline and peat from endangered bogs; with insect wings, limpet shells, unloved spruce needles, titling ocean horizons. A hold that treasures tales about what might happen next.
This ARK has been made in collaboration with the Wilderness Art Collective – a work of creative salvage, its cover and content pages, forged from abandoned archives and old typewriter keys.
Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 22 – ARK from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
May 2022: ‘After Ithaca’ and ‘Loss Soup’
What is the role of writing in times of unravelling and loss? Can the written word help re-entangle our hearts and imaginations in the living breathing world?
Charlotte Du Cann and Nick Hunt celebrated the launch of their new nonfiction and fiction collections, After Ithaca and ‘Loss Soup with a talk and readings earlier this year. Follow their journeys as they navigate through the Anthropocene and the Underworld, ecological crisis and cultural change, grief and extinction, myth and fairy tale, in search of meaning and kinship with the ancestral Earth.
After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time and Loss Soup and Other Stories are Dark Mountain’s first single-author collections, published in association with Greenbank Books.
After Ithaca and Loss Soup Online Book Launch – 26th May from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
Spring 2022: Issue 21 ‘Comfluence’
Dark Mountain: Issue 21 takes its inspiration from ‘confluence’. The image of watersmeet, of two streams merging into one, has long had sacred connotations, as shown by the votive offerings left at the point where rivers meet.
From modern-day lycanthropy tales – inter-species minglings between human and animal – to the melting, freezing waters of the Antarctic Convergence; from intergenerational trauma to the disastrous coming-together of nuclear meltdown; from the collapsing ‘Doomsday Glacier’ to swirling microbial ecosystems deep within the human body; the contributions of the 60 writers and artists in this book join to make new patterns in this meeting of the waters.
This issue is a collaboration between Dark Mountain and saltfront, the environmental humanities journal based in Salt Lake City, Utah and dedicated to a radically new type of ecological storytelling.
Online Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 21 from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
Autumn 2021: Issue 20 – ABYSS
ABYSS brings an uncivilised eye to the mindset of extractivism: the insatiable, pathological drive to plunder the Earth’s resources that has driven a seemingly endless expansion in consumption. From the hacked, fracked and exploded ground of the American West to tin mines in Cornwall and oil wells in Tajikistan; from 17th-century Dutch colonialism in Indonesia’s Banda Islands to an activist escapade in New Zealand’s Great South Basin; from lithium ponds in the Atacama Desert to the vanished rainforests of Borneo, the writers and artists in this book bear witness to this global pillage.
Inspired by the CODEX Foundation’s project EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, Dark Mountain’s 20th issue plumbs the depths of the pit we have dug in order to see how deep we have gone, and where we might go from here.
Online Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 20 – ABYSS from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
Spring 2021: Issue 19 ‘Requiem’
Dark Mountain’s nineteenth issue was created, in collaboration with art.earth’s Borrowed Time summit, as a memorial by 60+ artists and writers, a gathering of testimonies from people and places, griefwalkers and haunted lands. Ringed by the ashes of the burned forests of Australia and the Americas, its covers hold the honoured bones of dead creatures, reconfigured ceremonial staffs, the keening of poets, ancestral doorways, fallen feathers of the gyrfalcon, the wren and the black grouse, wreathed by leaves of roseroot from Greenland and milkweed seeds from Ontario, the sharp scent of Mexican marigolds that light our way to the Underworld.
Our key question in these unravelling times: how can we face and properly lament what we have lost? How is the act of mourning requisite to the world’s regeneration?
Online Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 19 from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
November 2020 THE PICTURE SHOW AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Welcome in the beginning of winter with a Dark Mountain-slanted light show. Hosted by filmmaker Jonny Randall, the online event showcases some of the submissions we’ve received in response to our call-out for uncivilised films earlier this year.
A selection of short films are screened over the course of an hour, featuring: visual poetry; a cinematic meditation on the Cairngorms; surreal eco-horror animation; a collaborative ritual between artist and tree; voices on what it means to re-indigenise and a multispecies ethnographic collaboration between humans and donkeys.
The films are followed by a post-screening conversation with some of the filmmakers, as well as questions and reflections from the audience.
Featured Films:
I. HOW THE EARTH MUST SEE ITSELF
Produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and Scottish Sculpture
Workshop.
Based on the book The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd and
performance project Into The Mountain by Simone Kenyon.
A film by Lucy Cash and Simone Kenyon
nationaltheatrescotland.com/latest/how-the-earth-must-see-itself-short-film-subtitled
II. HEALER
A film by Yixuan Maisie Luo
III. SCULPTING IN THE PYROCENE: A DISAPPEARING ACT
A film by Julie Williams
IV. EVERYTHING I NEVER DID, BUT NEVER LEFT BEHIND
Written and performed by Roger Bygott
Directed by Cory Kelly
V. LAND / SCAPE
A film by Michal Krawczyk and Giulia Lepori
VI. MADDER ISLE
Directed by Laura Spark
VII. EMERGENT SEAS: RE-INDIGENIZING THE GREAT LAKES
Written and Produced by Augustin of the Road and Lindsay Swann
Directed, Shot and Edited by Augustin of the Road
The Picture Show at the End of the World + discussion from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.
Autumn 2020: Issue 18 – FABULA
Dark Mountain: Issue 18 – FABULA, is our first book dedicated entirely to uncivilised fiction. In its pages you will find short stories, flash fiction, illustrations and artwork that attempt to navigate the troubled times we’re in, and the uncertain times ahead: from the bogs of a dystopian Ireland to near-future West Africa; from the drought-ravaged Australian Outback to the all-consuming Amazon. You will meet a vengeful river, litigious bears, a mythical forest guardian, the ghostly shades of America’s wars, and be exposed to a global pandemic – but not the one you’re expecting.
Launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 18 – FABULA from The Dark Mountain Project on Vimeo.