Roots & Branches

What started out as a movement of writers soon spread into something wilder and more unexpected, a tangle of brambles or the underground network of mycelium that links a forest into a living intelligence. In this section, we are starting to gather some of the fruits of this network and trace a few of the connections by which they came about.

These lines we trace are not Dark Mountain’s doing: the credit belongs to those who found something in our work and ran with it, often in directions that would never have occurred to us, weaving what they found into a wider patchwork of influences and inspirations.

The stories that come back to us are full of strange turns and chance encounters: a book turns up in a pizza shop in a village in Iceland, a theatre director meets an old friend on a night train heading to the Arctic Circle, a philosopher points a choreographer towards the manifesto and it leads her to a whole practice of Uncivilised Dance.

Sometimes the result is an invitation which comes back to us, or a work whose traces make it into a future Dark Mountain book. In other cases, all that reaches us are rumours and echoes.

This section is an ongoing and inevitably partial project of documentation – and we look forward to hearing new stories of the chances, collaborations and creations which have been tangled in one way or another with Dark Mountain. If you have a story you would like to share with us, then please get in touch.