Beginning with a research phase throughout 2025, Islands of Conviviality will host a series of events across the Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Atlantic, engaging scholars, artists, designers, and local communities in critical dialogues, fieldwork, and artistic experimentation. These encounters will explore Illich’s call for non-extractive, life-affirming systems and question how such principles might be extended beyond geographical islands to other forms of insular thinking—spaces of retreat and resistance, networks of solidarity, and practices that move between isolation and connection.
As part of this process, a Reading Circle is being organized in collaboration with Forest University (Šumski), WORKOVERTIME, ISSA, and other partners. This group will meet monthly in 2025 to explore conviviality, autonomy, and self-organized learning, pairing Illich’s writings with contemporary critical perspectives on technology, community, ecology, and alternative economies. The Reading Circle welcomes participation from those interested in alternative ways of learning and organizing, and will connect with broader discussions at the ISSA.
Through public gatherings, workshops, artistic and ecological interventions, and collaborative research, Islands of Conviviality builds a transnational platform for reimagining conviviality in contemporary contexts. Expanding beyond the Adriatic, it will engage island ecologies in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, as well as conceptual islands—territories of thought, practice, and possibility. As we approach the centenary of Illich’s birth in 2026, these gatherings will culminate in a series of events, publications, and collective actions that reflect on his legacy while generating new forms of island thinking and convivial practice.