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.
Thank you to everyone who joined us on Saturday, 5 September 2026, when we celebrated what would have been the 100th birthday of Ivan Illich.
It was a joy to gather under the timbers of the Red House, then on a late summer afternoon in the garden and finally around the long table in the old shoe shop.
On this page, you can learn more about Illich and the event. You can also sign up for news about future events here at Skolunkans kulturmakeri.
The Gathering
Our gathering in Östervåla on 5 September was 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.
This was an invitation 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. Participants were invited to share stories of their own, as we created a space of conversation with room for the thoughts and questions that arose, and new connections began to spark.
Those taking part included friends and strangers, neighbours and travellers from as far afield as Germany. There were those who had met Illich or who had been reading his work for over half a century, and others to whom his name was new when we made the invitation to this gathering.
We started the afternoon with fika, including sandwiches and hot drinks, and at around 5pm we adjourned for drinks, followed by a simple dinner shared around the table.
Under detta evenemang använde vi mest engelska som gemensamt språk för att inkludera internationella gäster. Men det fanns också mycket diskussion på svenska.
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We continue to host events and gatherings of different kinds, informed by the spirit of conviviality and hospitality which Illich and his friends embodied.
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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.
Learn More About Illich
As we prepared for this gathering, Ayșem and Dougald recorded these conversations where we talk more about who Ivan Illich was and how we found our way to his work.
English 
Swedish