Encounters with Ivan Illich
Saturday 5 September, 2026 · 12.30-21.00
David Cayley: Is your counsel really to live in the dark?
Ivan Illich: No. Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you’re a flame in the dark.
On or around the weekend of 4-6 September 2026, in places across the world, friends and strangers will gather to celebrate the life and work of Ivan Illich on what would have been his 100th birthday.
As part of these celebrations, we invite anyone in our corner of the world to join us in Skolunkan, the old shoe shop in Östervåla, 50km north of Uppsala, for an afternoon of stories and conversations, followed by a convivial dinner.
Whether you are new to Illich’s work, have engaged with it for years, or anywhere in between, there is a place for you around this table.
Introducing Illich
Ivan Illich was a mercurial figure, straddling identities; a man around whom myths gather, while labels refuse to stick. Born in Vienna in 1926, raised between there and his grandfather’s home on the Dalmatian coast, he was a teenager when his family had to flee the Nazis. In adult life, he spoke for the virtues of grounding in a ‘particular soil’ and ‘a shared local culture’, yet recognised that his own destiny was to live as ‘a wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim’.
As a Catholic priest in the 1950s and 60s, he defended the syncretic local forms of faith he found in Latin America against the forces of the Vatican and modernising development programmes, and created a remarkable language school, think tank and free university at the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
As a prominent public intellectual in the 1970s, his wanderings took him around the world – including to Sweden – and into numerous fields, sparking international debates around education, energy and medicine, shaping the movements of environmentalism and appropriate technology, critical development studies and degrowth, and working closely with activists from Gustavo Esteva to John McKnight.
He outlived the years of his fame and went on gathering with friends to collaborate on a deepening historical enquiry into the assumptions on which economic modernity was founded, and he died peacefully during a nap at his friend Barbara Duden’s house in Bremen in December 2002.
Two decades later, his work continues to light a flame in the dark for philosophers and theologians, hackers and technology critics, farmers and Indigenous activists, and to provide illumination for many movements and projects, among them the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME.
Explore some of Illich’s work on our school website.
The Invitation
Our gathering in Östervåla on 5 September will be hosted by Dougald Hine of a school called HOME together with Ayşem Mert who is an associate professor in environmental politics at Stockholm University and an old friend of our school.
We invite you to join us to share and listen to stories of Illich, how his work came to matter to us and the ways it continues to work on our thinking and doing.
You are warmly invited to share stories of your own. If you would like us to set aside a little time during the afternoon for you to share something with the whole group, tell us when you register, and we will make room for it.
More generally, this will be a space of conversation with room for the thoughts and questions that arise, and our hopes for this gathering lie not least in the connections that it may spark.
We’ll start the afternoon with fika, including sandwiches and hot drinks, and at around 5pm we will adjourn for drinks, followed by a simple dinner shared around the table.
Under detta evenemang kommer vi mest använda engelska som gemensamt språk för att inkludera internationella gäster. Men det kommer också att finnas möjlighet för diskussioner på svenska.
Register for A Flame in the Dark
This gathering is offered as a gift to anyone to whom the invitation speaks and we make no charge for joining us. For those who feel the pull to do so, there will be ways to contribute to sustaining the work that makes it possible.
The shoe shop has room for around thirty participants, so we need a sense of how many people to expect. With that in mind, please use this form to tell us you are coming:
For a small place, Östervåla is blessed with a good mix of gathering spaces, so if we find the attendance is growing beyond the capacity of Skolunkan, we’ll endeavour to arrange a larger venue. Again, please let us know if you are planning to join us, so that we can gauge this.
Getting Here
Östervåla is 50km north of Uppsala.
The 844 bus runs from Uppsala central station throughout the day and evening. The bus station in Östervåla is seven minutes walk from our venue.
If coming by car, you can use the Vårdcentralen car park along Åbygränd which is generally empty at weekends.
Come to the garden entrance to Skolunkan, opposite Vårdcentralen, and walk up the drive, past the red barn.
Map links:
Accommodation
We have reserved a number of four-bed rooms at the simple hostel at Östervåla sports ground for both Friday and Saturday nights. The cost per bed is 250kr/night. We can provide sheets. You can book accommodation when registering for the gathering.
Questions?
If there’s anything you’d like to know, get in touch through the school website.
Travelling from further off?
We welcome guests from near and far – and equally, we are keen to spread the rumour of other gatherings happening around the world on or near the weekend of Illich’s centenary.
Visit the Illich at 100 page on the school website for contacts in different places.
Swedish 
English