Wednesday April 15th, Drop-In 2pm-6pm

The books in our library contain a wealth of ideas from thinkers past and present. Together they add up to a radically new, emerging world-view.

We open our library for readers every Wednesday afternoon. Drop in and browse our growing collection or bring your own book to read, but please don’t bring laptops, kindles, smartphones or other electronic devices. To view our catalogue, visit our Library page.

Saturday April 18th, 6.30 for 7pm

Join us for Bint Mbareh’s “Choir for Non-Musicians”, an evening of vocal connection designed for people who use their voices verbally, but not musically.

Bint – whose research into folklore in Palestine has schooled her in technologies which transmit the voice, its history and the knowledge it carries – will gently guide us through a series of experimental vocal exercises: whispering illegible sentences in unison, clapping in extreme synchronisation at different speeds, conducting one another, translating one another’s gibberish, finding echoes, repeating passages of text in unison, and more. Non-musicians are warmly invited; All levels of vocal confidence welcomed. Participants need only bring themselves.

Bint is a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between the water wave and the sound wave leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibility of being enveloped by the voice, by sounding communally, like being enveloped by a water body. She challenges settler-colonial epistemology by taking seriously Palestinian ways of knowing, from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage as an instigator of political revolution.

Friday April 24th, 6.30 for 7.30pm.

Join us for an evening of music and folklore with Mataio Austin Dean and Ula Taylor-Reilly. Mataio and Ula will perform a short set of traditional English folksongs, interpreted through a radical, decolonial, feminist lens. They will discuss their research on the songs as part of the performance. There’ll also be a chance to learn some classic folk tunes and join a sing along.

Mataio, best known as a member of the traditional music group Shovel Dance Collective, is an artist, musician, poet, and activist from Portsmouth. He focuses primarily on folksong from the South of England, seeing the performance of the songs as part of a decolonial process: centring notions of locality, solidarity, and international exchange, while rejecting totalising, imperialistic, nationalistic structures of Britishness and whiteness. Born to a Guyanese mother and an English father, his work also explores, through oral and visual culture, the darkly intertwined histories of Guyana and England.

Friday Night Music is our series of relaxed drinks evenings featuring a short musical set followed by food and socialising. Come before 7.30pm to enjoy the performance, or after 8.15pm if you just want to join us for supper and/or drinks. Entry is free after 8.15pm. The bar is open for drinks until 11pm.

Tickets are reduced for Kairos Community Members. Community Membership is automatic and free for anyone who has attended at least three talk or discussion events, at least one of those in the last nine months. The Coupon Code to book will be on the next Community Membership email. If you can’t wait, email us at events@kairos.london.

Wednesday April 29th to Tuesday May 5th
Selgars Mill, Uffculme, Cullompton, Devon

The worlds created by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism are coming to an end. By remaking the collective imaginaries – of everyday landscapes, of the past and the future, and of consciousness and the human mind – we can end these worlds peaceably and bring about the new world struggling to be born.

Join us for the first Kairos residency: six days of talks and discussion, walks and contemplation, community-building, rejuvenation and fun.

Geographer and landscape historian Tim Waterman will present the ideas he’s currently developing for a forthcoming series of four books on “Reworlding”. His daily talks will spark a group exploration into how the human imagination shapes the world around us and how we can start to move towards a new paradigm.

In addition, we’ll have guest facilitators to lead walks and other activities that will help us to re-conceptualise and re-connect with the land. We’ll explore the mythology, history and geology of the local landscape, learn to read the topography with maps and draw our own, become better attuned to the more-than-human world around us, acquire ancient countryside skills, and experience other embodied and meditative practices.

In a session by Devon-based writer Eleanor Robins, we’ll learn the age-old art of memorising poetry by walking it into a landscape, bringing us into intimate relationship with both language and land. We’ll acquire tools to help us memorise a poem over the course of the week, with the chance to offer this poem as a recited gift at the week’s close, and go home with a living memory of the landscape of the residency.

Kim Willis will discuss the importance of mythology and story telling, sharing a series of stories that fit the themes of Tim’s work. Chris Holland will teach us about bird language: how it works, how to interpret the different sounds birds make and what their calls can reveal to us as we move through the landscape. Alison Seddon will lead an embodied, interactive workshop to playfully explore different ways of relating to each other so we can prepare for the transformations that are coming with grace, humility, love and delight. And local musician Ella Paul will perform for us one evening with the chance for us all to learn simple instruments and join in.

There’ll also be plenty of unscheduled time for games, cooking, reading and helping in the vegetable garden, as well as the chance to bring your own offerings to the residency and to shape how it unfolds.

This is the first of a planned series in which we take the Kairos mix of radical ideas for social and cultural change, intelligent salon-style discussion, group participation, community building and conviviality in a semi-domestic space, and extend it over a series of days in a beautiful, rural setting.

We’ll be staying at Selgars Mill, a beautiful converted 19th Century mill house with cottages, set in eight acres of secluded grounds in the Culm Valley in Mid Devon. We’re aiming for a selected group of 20 (a mix of activists, artists, designers, academics and thinkers of varied ages and economic circumstances) staying mainly in single occupancy or twin rooms. There are also a couple of multiple occupancy rooms, an annex apartment, a shepherds hut and several newly-built glamping cabins.

As this is an experiment, and as we’ll be living together, cooking together, managing the space together and co-creating much of our time together, we do ask that you only apply if you’re confident you can embrace a spirit of flexibility, amiability, imagination, hands-on participation and openness – to people, ideas and imaginative possibilities. We want this to be as sociable and fun as it is stimulating and galvanising.

Wednesday May 6th, 6.30 for 7pm

For our May Book Club, we’re reading “Vigil” by George Saunders.

Publisher’s description: “Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

“Vigil” transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamouring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materialises; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s post-death future.

With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.”

Tuesday May 12th, 6.30 for 7pm

Open Projects is our bi-monthly open mic night, where we learn about each other’s projects, build connections and offer each other support. For this special event, the last in our current space on Tottenham Court Road, we’re also inviting anyone who has previously presented to come and give us an update about their project.

The evening will include a series of short presentations of new projects, followed by questions, discussion and offers of support. We’ll then take a break for a one-pot vegan supper before hearing brief updates from previous Open Projects presenters.

Open Projects Night is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.

All are welcome to attend. If you’d like to present a new project, please send a brief description along with any multi-media to events@Kairos.London before Friday May 8th. If you’d like to give us an update on a previous presentation, please send the name of your project and the date you presented to events@Kairos.London. If you’d like to just come and listen you are also most welcome.

Thursday May 21st, 6.30 for 7pm

Life is not just another physical process. When life appeared on Earth it introduced something radically new into the universe: purposeful bodies that actively work to keep themselves alive.

Unlike non-living matter, life-forms continually maintain themselves, repair damage, avoid danger and reproduce. Evolution refines these forms over time, but their purposiveness begins in the living body itself.

With life, the world stops being only a chain of physical events. It becomes a place where plants, animals and even microbes constantly sense, evaluate and act in ways that protect and sustain their lives. This makes life inherently intelligent, agentive and meaningful – not a biological machine run by genes but living forms pursuing what matters to them.

Melanie Challenger, author of “Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World” and “How to Be Animal”, will discuss how understanding life in this way changes how we see the world. She will explain how The Earth becomes a realm of purposeful beings and how this reshapes how we see life, nature, and ourselves.

Thursday May 28th, 6.30 for 7pm

When we’re trying to do good – whether in politics, activism, charity or community work – it’s easy to become attached to the idea of being good. Does that matter?

Anthea Lawson, a campaigner and author, has been investigating and documenting the saviour complex – that suite of unconscious motivations which can hide in the shadow of being ‘good’, and which lead to behaviours that can cut across our avowed purposes:

Moralising in lieu of strategy; Provision of information in lieu of building relationships; Purity politics and saviour heroics that bolster the shaky self, but impede connection; Internalisation of old Christian stories – albeit with God taken out – about saving and burdens.

None of this is inevitable if we are willing to look within at the stories that run us. But there are perennial obstacles to doing so as part of politics, not least the old binary between our inner lives and the outer world, an opposition that runs deep in western culture, in modernity, and in patriarchy.

In this talk, Anthea will shine a light on progressive baggage and suggest some antidotes to its less helpful instructions, while thinking through, and countering, the obstacles to turning within as a necessary political project.

Every Wednesday afternoon, 2-6pm
Wednesday Reading Room
Our weekly library opening hours are between 2 and 6pm. Drop in and browse our growing collection or bring your own book to read, but please no laptops, kindles, smartphones or other electronic devices. If you’d like access at another time, email events@kairos.london and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

Every other Friday evening, 6.30 for 7.30pm
Friday Music Nights
Friday Music Nights is our fortnightly series of relaxed drinks evenings featuring a short musical set followed by food and socialising. Come before 7.30pm to hear the music, or after 8.15pm if you just want to join us for supper and/or drinks. Entry is half-price for Community Members and free for everyone after 8.15pm. The bar stays open for drinks until 11pm.

The Last Wednesday evening of Every Month, 6.30 for 7pm
Book Club
Look out for listings here, or email events@kairos.london if you’d like to join the Book Club WhatsApp group.

The First Wednesday evening of Every Month, 6.30-10.30pm
Wednesday Drinks
Our new monthly mid-week bar night, with free entry and a pay bar serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks as well as vegan food. Whether you’re a regular Kairos attendee or have yet to come to one of our events, if you’re on your own or with a group, or if you just want a quiet catch up with a friend, all are welcome.

The First Tuesday evening of Every Other Month, 6.30 for 7pm
Open Projects Night
Our regular open mike night, where we learn about each other’s projects, build connections and offer each other support. Look out for listings on this page or email events@kairos.london with details of the project you’d like to share.

Friday day-time, 10am-5pm
Community Day
We’re now opening our doors on Fridays for aligned groups needing a place to meet. This is non-exclusive, daytime use of our space for brainstorms and strategy meetings, book group discussions and other creative get-togethers. Only by arrangement. Email events@kairos.london.