Past Events at Kairos
Thursday June 1st
Time Beyond Cronos with Charlotte Du Cann
We live boxed in linear time, driven by perpetual deadlines. dragged down by the ‘nightmare of history’, haunted by a future of ecological loss and social breakdown. Modern technological lives go too fast to assimilate any kinds of knowledge, or ways of being, outside the 24/7 story of ‘progress’.
Charlotte Du Cann, writer, editor and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project helped us explore the deeper cycles of time – ancestral, mythic, Indigenous time – and the non-linear perception Kairos brings, to break free from Cronos’ tyrannical clock and calendar. How can we sit with this troubled present and connect with the wider cycles of time? How can we build a practice which enables us to compost the dark legacies of the past, and allow other possibilities to reveal themselves?
Wednesday May 24th
Screening of Iain McGilchrist Documentary “The Divided Brain”
The documentary screening was followed by a guided discussion on McGilchrist’s theory and its implications.
Friday May 19th
Kairos Book Club: “The Dispossessed” by Ursula Le Guin
For the third meeting of our book club, we discussed science fiction classic “The Dispossessed”, Ursula K Le Guin’s much admired 1974 anarchist utopia.
Shevek is a brilliant scientist who is attempting to find a new theory of time – but there are those who are jealous of his work, and will do anything to block him. So he leaves his homeland, hoping to find a place of more liberty and tolerance. Initially feted, Shevek soon finds himself being used as a pawn in a deadly political game.
Wednesday May 10th
Climate, Technology, Justice & Rights: Can We Get The Whole World To Agree On Any Of Them? with AC Grayling
Friday April 21st – Sunday April 23rd
Comic Book Soup: A Food-themed Weekend of Collaborative Visual Story-telling
A special Kairos event that unfolded over the weekend of April 21st-23rd. Guided by designer John Fass and writer Toby Litt, and inspired by Swedish folk tale Nail Soup, we came together to make a giant comic book to tell the story of people gathering ingredients to make a meal together.
We launched our story on Friday evening with cocktails and supper and continued all day Saturday. On the Sunday we pulled it all together in a workshop with Toby Litt. Musician Jessie Maryon Davies then helped us turn our story into a song and then we cooked together.
People dropped in for a few minutes or a couple of hours, shared stories, made drawings, wrote speech bubbles, or just came to chat, meet, drink and eat.
Pictures of our comic book will be on our Instagram page soon.
Tuesday April 18th
The New Lucas Plan: A Workers-Led Transition
In the late 1970s, a group of workers at Lucas Aerospace, threatened by corporate restructure and mass redundancy, came up with their own plan to switch production away from weapons and into socially useful products. Today, the New Lucas Plan, an alliance of trade unionists, academics, and others, is developing a bottom-up, workers-led strategy for how to transition rapidly out of fossil fuel-based technologies.
Hilary Wainwright, sociologist, activist, author and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine, talked about the history of the original Lucas Plan and what needs to happen now to spread the principles of the New Lucas Plan. Followed by discussion.
Monday April 17th
Screening of “How To Blow Up A Pipeline” with Rowan Tilly
A special preview screening of the feature film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” directed by Daniel Goldhaber and based on the controversial book by Andreas Malm.
After the film, activist and nonviolence advocate Rowan Tilly led a discussion on the ethics and efficacy of sabotage. Is it intrinsically violent, or could some types of property damage still sit within the principles of nonviolence?
Friday April 14th
Kairos Book Club: “We Are Nature Defending Itself” by Isabelle Fremaux and Jay Jordan
For the second meeting of our book club, we discussed Fremeaux and Jordan’s non-fiction account of the French protest camp the Zad (Zone to Defend). The book blends rich eyewitness descriptions with theory, inspired by a diverse array of approaches, from neo-animism to revolutionary biology, insurrectionary writings and radical art history.
Tuesday April 11th
Screening of “Accidental Anarchist” with Güney Yildiz & Carne Ross in conversation
In the documentary “Accidental Anarchist” (2017, 1h) former diplomat Carne Ross goes in search of an alternative to capitalist democracy. His quest takes in pre-Franco Spain, Occupy Wall Street, and the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, eventually leading him to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), a decentralised, non-hierarchical governance structure that emerged from the Kurdish resistance movement.
Following the film, Carne was in conversation with specialist researcher, Güney Yildiz, who explained more about the theory behind AANES and what’s happening on the ground today.
Monday April 10th
The Rights of Nature with César Rodríguez-Garavito
Colombian lawyer and New York University professor, César Rodríguez-Garavito, was passing through London and at Kairos to discuss his More Than Human Rights (MOTH) project, a global, interdisciplinary collaboration between prominent scientists, philosophers, lawyers, Indigenous leaders, advocates and journalists.
Questions he raised for discussion included: How do findings from the natural sciences, Indigenous knowledge, and other fields shed new light on the idea of the rights of nature? What types of non-human entities should be protected and what types of rights should they hold? How are social movements, policymakers, judges, and other actors challenging the current anthropocentric view of rights.
Wednesday April 5th
Revolution: Inevitable, Justified and Effective with Roger Hallam
Extinction Rebellion co-founder and social movement theorist Roger Hallam was at Kairos to share his latest thinking. In this interactive talk, he argued that Revolution is 1. Inevitable (collapse is locked in), 2. Justified (the elites are to blame) and 3. Effective (only regime change will save what can still be saved).
Roger also described what nonviolent democratic revolution would look like as an alternative to the descent into various forms of fascism.
Thursday March 30th
Wittgenstein, Co-freedom & The Politics of Ecology with Rupert Read
Rupert Read, philosopher, environmental movement strategist and author of ‘Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy’’, argued that Wittgenstein is above all a philosopher of freedom – but that he sees freedom as utterly inextricable from our being together. Freedom is co-freedom, co-liberation. And all of this depends entirely upon a functioning ecosystem. Which in turns depends upon dispensing with fantasies of endless material and technological ‘progress’. Which takes us back to Wittgenstein, who, at root, was a critic of ‘progress’ much more than he was a philosopher of language.
Rupert explained how, as he sees things, Wittgenstein’s philosophy and an authentic politics/ethics of ecology and enlightenment are two sides of the same coin, providing valuable insights for activists, philosophers, devotees of Wittgenstein and those with only the vaguest idea of what he stood for.
Wednesday March 22nd
Box Of Darkness: The Transformative Power Of Grief with Liz Jensen
“Someone I know once gave me a box of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”
From The Uses of Sorrow, Mary Oliver
It’s human instinct to turn away from the things we fear most. But to shut out the pain of grief – past, present or anticipatory – is to miss an opportunity for radical growth and healing. Drawing parallels between personal grief and ecological grief, Liz Jensen – novelist, founder-member of XR Writers Rebel, and mother of the young activist Iggy Fox, who died suddenly in February 2020 – reflected on the importance of honouring our rawest and most disturbing feelings in order to find resilience, empowerment, and imaginative new ways to inhabit this unprecedented era.
Tuesday March 21st
Protest Rights: A Benchmark For Political Freedom with Raj Chada
Solicitor Raj Chada, who has defended 100s of protestors (Extinction Rebellion’s Shell 7, the Colston 4, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil, among others) explored what the increasingly punitive approach being taken by the courts says about our broader political moment. He cited recent judgements preventing mention of the climate crisis as mitigation in jury trials, and the subsequent imprisonment of those who defy the ban, as well as the use of private injunctions by the government’s Highways Agency to bypass the criminal courts and impose prison sentences for non-custodial criminal offences. Does the tougher stance being taken by the courts reflect a wider intolerance of criticism by our current government, and how worried should we be? What can it reveal about the hidden values underpinning our criminal justice system? And what would it take for the judiciary to refocus its attention away from the mass prosecution of peaceful protestors, and instead, towards the corporations and institutions driving the climate and nature crises.
Friday March 17th
Kairos Book Club: “Venomous Lumpsucker” by Ned Beauman
“The venomous lumpsucker is the most intelligent fish on the planet. Or maybe it was the most intelligent fish on the planet. Because it might already be extinct. Nobody knows. And nobody cares. Except for two people…Gripping and singular, Venomous Lumpsucker is a comedy about environmental devastation that asks: do we have it in us to avert the tragedy of mass extinction?”
For the first meeting of our new book club we talked about Ned Beauman’s darkly satirical novel Venomous Lumpsucker, an incredibly smart, brilliantly plotted satire about human beings’ destruction of the natural world, set in the not-too-distant future. Despite the tragic subject matter it’s still a compelling (even fun) read and packed full of interesting ideas (political, philosophical, psychological, ecological). Reviewed in the London Review of Books, the Observer, the Guardian and the Financial Times. Read the first chapter.
Tuesday March 14th
Screening of “An Ecology of Mind” by Nora Bateson
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” – Gregory Bateson.
“An Ecology of Mind” is a portrait of anthropologist, biologist, and psychotherapist Gregory Bateson, directed by his daughter Nora Bateson. This award-winning documentary (2010, 1hr), seen through the relationship between father and daughter, is an examination of how Bateson thought, and an introduction to ‘systems thinking’ as a way of understanding the interrelationships within the natural world.
“Looking at what holds systems together is a radical step toward sewing the world back together, from the inside,” Bateson said.
In the post-screening discussion we asked: if we only look at the climate and nature crises through the usual reductionist scientific framing, what might we be missing? How does our perspective of the world influence the actions we take, and how can that understanding help us at this current moment? For the discussion we were joined by Kairos member Jonathan Nylander and Dawn Plimmer, both graduates of the International Bateson Institute’s Warm Data Lab training. The Warm Data Lab is a discursive process developed by Nora Bateson and based on her father’s approach to systems thinking.
You can read reviews of “An Ecology of Mind” here, including one by the Huffington Post.
You can watch the full-length film on Vimeo.
Thursday March 9th
Doughnut Economics Workshop
Doughnut Economics offers an alternative economic goal ‘to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet’. It provides ways to achieve this goal, including the regenerative and the distributive. Rob Shorter from The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), led a workshop into how the ideas of Doughnut Economics can be applied at the neighbourhood, business, educational and local government level.
Wednesday March 8th
Lunchtime Recorded Lecture: “What Do We Want To Sustain?” by Carmody Grey
For the first in our new series of recorded lunchtime lectures, we showed philosopher and theologian Carmody Grey‘s 2021 Hook Lecture on faith climate change, in which she explores how we’ve got to this point of crisis, why we aren’t saving ourselves and what it is we actually want to sustain. Carmody, a unique and inspiring voice, was our first ever speaker at Kairos when we launched last October. If you missed the event you can watch the lecture here.
If you have suggestions for recorded lectures you’ll like us to show as part of our lunchtime series, please email events@Kairos.London
Tuesday February 28th
Justice For The Global South with Asad Rehman
Since our current crisis is really the intersection of multiple global crises stemming from capitalism, colonialism and inequality, our response needs to be similarly intersectional. In this presentation and discussion, Asad Rehman, director of War on Want, proposed that the only way to achieve the necessary, far-reaching transformation of our global power structures, is through alliances between diverse, people-led, grass-roots movements. He outlined an alternative vision for North/South power relations: a Global Green New Deal. He also described how this transformation is already beginning, with new power arrangements starting to emerge in South America, Asia and Africa.
Tuesday February 21st
The Feministation Of The Public Realm – & How To Take It Further with Indra Adnan
Psycho-social therapist Indra Adnan led a discussion on the power of the female experience in urgent efforts to reconnect with nature, transform our cities and institutions and find a more holistic way of life. As humanity faces a crossroads, so too does feminism. It’s time to build on past successes, including the growing feminisation of the public realm, and to push them further.
Friday February 17th
Educating For The Anthropocene with Peter Sutoris
Education has never played as critical a role in determining humanity’s future as it does in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humankind’s unprecedented control over the natural environment. Interdisciplinary thinker Peter Sutoris, drawing on his research in India and South Africa, outlined an alternative educational model, one that bridges schooling and activism and prepares today’s young people for a radically transformed world.
Wednesday February 15th
Kairos Film Club: “Synecdoche, New York” with a talk by Sarah Stein Lubrano
Do you suspect the world you inhabit is a fabrication in place of the real thing? “Synecdoche New York” (2008, 2h4m), directed by Charlie Kaufman and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a film about what happens to our perception when we live through layers and layers of representations of ourselves and others. Drawing on philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s ideas about simulacra and simulation, it is a prophetic meditation on modern society in which all meaning has been replaced by symbols and signifiers. After the screening, academic and writer Sarah Stein Lubrano gave an overview of the film’s themes and led a discussion of its significance for our current moment.
Synopsis: “Theatre director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. Fresh off of a successful production of Death of a Salesman, he has traded in the suburban blue-hairs and regional theater of Schenectady for the cultured audiences and bright footlights of Broadway. Armed with a MacArthur grant and determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can put his whole self, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan’s theater district. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a small mock-up of the city outside. As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden’s own life veers wildly off the tracks.”
Wednesday February 1st
Bruno Latour: A Politics Of The Earth with Noortje Marres
Sociologist Noortje Marres, who studied under the late Bruno Latour, explored his work on ecological politics – in particular his vision for a politics of the earth and his call for a new ecological class to seize the political reins and guide us through the polycrisis. Noortje also advocated for “ecology” as the best frame through which to re-imagine human society’s relationship with the natural world.
Wednesday January 25th
Kicking Off The New Year with Vanessa Chamberlin and Baby Sol
As an alternative winter celebration, we held an evening of story-telling on the longest night of the year. We shared stories about darkness and renewal, loss and hope, collapse and re-emergence in a beautiful candle-lit venue. Poet Ruth Padel read from Watershed, her forthcoming collection about water and climate, and Kairos director Zoë Blackler shared a Hungarian folk tale. There was a story of peace and reconciliation in Columbia. a fable by William Morris, a poem by Toni Spencer, the Hanukka story, and a reflection on grief and kairos by Liz Jensen. We also discussed the power of the imagination and the need to find new stories to help us through the challenges ahead.
Wednesday December 21st
Winter Solstice Story-Telling with Ruth Padel and more
As an alternative winter celebration, we held an evening of story-telling on the longest night of the year. We shared stories about darkness and renewal, loss and hope, collapse and re-emergence in a beautiful candle-lit venue. Poet Ruth Padel read from Watershed, her forthcoming collection about water and climate, and Kairos director Zoë Blackler shared a Hungarian folk tale. There was a story of peace and reconciliation in Columbia. a fable by William Morris, a poem by Toni Spencer, the Hanukka story, and a reflection on grief and kairos by Liz Jensen. We also discussed the power of the imagination and the need to find new stories to help us through the challenges ahead.
Thursday December 1st
Party: Farewell Holborn Viaduct
A CELEBRATION of an amazing first two months for Kairos, a THANK YOU to everyone who helped made it such a success and a FAREWELL to our temporary first home. We weren’t together long, Holborn Viaduct, but you have a special place in our hearts and we’ll miss you. The evening featured Zander mixing the cocktails, Ben and Jo spinning the vinyl, and the Sibyl waiting in her cave to answer people’s questions about their fate.
Monday November 28th
Screening of ‘Once You Know’ with director Emmanuel Cappellin
A second screening of Once You Know by Emmanuel Cappellin (2020, 105mins) – a personal exploration of what it means to emotionally accept the truth about climate change, which received glowing reviews. Emmanuel, who was visiting London, was with us in person to lead a post-screening discussion.
SYNOPSIS: Today, like a ship entering the storm, industrial civilisation faces the first symptoms of energy depletion and climate change induced collapse. Once You Know asks the disturbing questions: Are there better ways of collapsing than others? What is meaningful work on the way down?
Director Emmanuel Cappellin is obsessed with how to best respond personally and collectively. His quest leads him around the world to meet five of the world’s leading climate scientists and energy experts. They share with him the truth, chaos, and hope in their work. They allow him to challenge everything he took for granted – from growth-based democracies to personal freedoms.
This odyssey brings him back to himself and to Saillans, his small mountain village. In this life-size, open sky laboratory, everything becomes once again possible: having a child, redefining questions of social justice, implementing participatory democracy, starting an energy transition…The first steps, perhaps, towards some kind of collective resilience.
Friday November 25th
Supper Club with Mark Vernon
With Mark Vernon on William Blake, London’s greatest poet and prophet, also a tremendous thinker with a keen diagnosis of what was unfolding in his time, which is also our time. Blake understood the human yearning for more, the multifaceted inner life of places and ages, the mixture of ecologies within which, and with which, we live.
This talk and discussion included an introduction to some of Blake’s most punchy intuitions, thoughts on how his insights matter, and time to explore and question what he might be saying to us now.
Food was provided by Super Nature, an experimental kitchen based in Hackney with a strong environmental agenda. Their team of chefs, foragers, artists, activists and cultivators work in collaboration to address problems with our global food system and the way we eat. Every creation is a celebration of hyper-seasonal produce using an innovative ‘root to fruit’ zero waste approach, using plant based whole and raw foods sourced from local farmers practicing minimal intervention and regenerative agriculture methods.
Wednesday November 23rd
Entrapment and Escape with Anoushka Grace
With Mark Vernon on William Blake, London’s greatest poet and prophet, also a tremendous thinker with a keen diagnosis of what was unfolding in his time, which is also our time. Blake understood the human yearning for more, the multifaceted inner life of places and ages, the mixture of ecologies within which, and with which, we live.
This talk and discussion included an introduction to some of Blake’s most punchy intuitions, thoughts on how his insights matter, and time to explore and question what he might be saying to us now.
Food was provided by Super Nature, an experimental kitchen based in Hackney with a strong environmental agenda. Their team of chefs, foragers, artists, activists and cultivators work in collaboration to address problems with our global food system and the way we eat. Every creation is a celebration of hyper-seasonal produce using an innovative ‘root to fruit’ zero waste approach, using plant based whole and raw foods sourced from local farmers practicing minimal intervention and regenerative agriculture methods.
Wednesday November 16th
Navigating The Global Phase Shift with Nafeez Ahmed
The world is going through an extraordinary convergence of ecological, energy, economic, geopolitical and social crises. But at their root, this is a single global systemic crisis that at worst threatens the destruction of planetary life support systems. Simultaneously, we are seeing the emergence of exponential technologies, some of which might offer new ways of solving our biggest challenges, but some of which may even worsen them. How do these different crises interact? Why are they worsening at the same time?
In this talk, systems theorist and investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed used the concept of a “global phase shift” – among other systems lenses and tools – to aid understanding of how to navigate a unique moment in human and planetary history, the transformation of the global system in which the old industrial paradigm is collapsing, as a new system is emerging. What lies ahead could encompass collapse, dystopia or renewal: but to breakthrough to renewal, we must be able to see both risks and possibilities, so that we can make better choices.
Tuesday November 1st
Despair, Acceptance, Transformation: “Once You Know” & Caroline Hickman
Screening of “Once You Know” by Emmanuel Cappellin (2020, 105mins) – a personal exploration of what it means to emotionally accept the truth about climate change, which received glowing reviews.
Followed by a presentation by climate psychologist and psychotherapist Caroline Hickman who explored how depression, rage and despair are our strongest allies in transformative, resilient action.
Saturday October 29th
Introducing the Kairos Supper Club with Carne Ross
For our first ever SUPPER CLUB, we were delighted to have as our guest speaker Carne Ross, writer and founder of Independent Diplomat, the world’s first non-profit diplomatic advisory group.
Carne talked about the ideas in his new book, What is to be done? which propose answers to the ‘polycrisis’ in the environment, democracy and society, and offered a radical but practical alternative to the current model of liberal democracy and capitalism.
Supper was cooked by Super Nature, an experimental kitchen based in Hackney with a strong environmental agenda. Their team of chefs, foragers, artists, activists and cultivators work in collaboration to address problems with our global food system and the way we eat. Every creation is a celebration of hyper-seasonal produce using an innovative ‘root to fruit’ zero waste approach, using plant-based whole and raw foods sourced from local farmers practicing minimal intervention and regenerative agriculture methods.
Tuesday October 25th
In Conversation: Activism
Author and campaigner Anthea Lawson and reader in political sociology Graeme Hayes discussed why everyone isn’t in the streets, and what history and a deeper understanding of the dynamics of activism can teach us about how people mobilise. With reference to soup-throwing.
There was also be a rare chance to see New York-based guerrilla theatre group Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, accompanied by the UK Stop Shopping Choir.
Sunday October 23rd
Sunday Film Salon
For our first film salon we screened L’Argent (Money) by Robert Bresson (1983) in the Kairos cinema room. It was followed by a presentation written by Professor Nicky Marsh from University of Southhampton whose work examines the ways that economic ideas – like money, risk, credit and debt – become represented in the culture at large, to form part of our imaginary and our fantasy. Nicky couldn’t attend in person due to illness, so her talked was delivered by Devorah Baum and was followed by an animated discussion on the power of money as our controlling metaphor.
The Kairos Film Salon is a monthly series curated by Josh Appignanesi, pairing provocative and life-changing films with special guest speakers, drawing all participants into guided conversation around that month’s theme.
Tuesday October 18th
Kairos Cinema Preview
We opened the Kairos Cinema, with two short talks and a mini-screening.
As Amitav Ghosh said, “the climate crisis is a crisis of the imagination”. So how can the stories we tell help us to think again?
Film-maker Josh Appignanesi spoke about that elusive thing we call change and what role the arts have to play in it. He also explained the thinking behind our monthly Sunday afternoon Film Salon.
Kairos’s director Zoë Blackler talked about how sci-fi can help us reimagine the world and why she’s proud to be a Trekkie.
Followed by an episode from a classic sci-fi series (45mins)
Tuesday October 11th
Introduction to Kairos
With short talks and complimentary drinks and vegetarian food.
Nick Anim, researcher of contemporary movements at UCL and social justice activist spoke about how to build cross-movement coalitions to counter the forces that divide us.
Jonathan Rowson, philosopher and founding director of Perspectiva talked about how Western society has turned consumption, a basic human act, into consumerism, a prevailing cultural ideology, and asked us to imagine a world
beyond consumerism.
Thursday October 6th
Members’ BYOB Drinks Night
With a performance by singers Sam Lee and Jessie Lloyd, including a new song by Sam inspired by Carmody Grey’s talk at Kairos two nights before.
Thursday October 4th
Introduction to Kairos
With short talks and complimentary drinks and vegetarian food.
Carmody Grey philosopher from Durham University spoke about how we can start asking questions again about what it means to be human and to live a good life.
Paul Powlesland, barrister, Lawyers for Nature spoke about why we need a new relationship between the law, nature and the earth and why this needs to be an ecosystem of legal interventions. Paul explained Rights of Nature and why they
are a crucial part of any such eco-system.
