KEEPING A RENDEZVOUS
KEEPING A RENDEZVOUS
Local gatherings around the world to celebrate John Berger’s centenary
“Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”
The 5th of November 2026 would have been John Berger’s 100th birthday.
We are making an invitation – to anyone for whom Berger’s work has mattered, who found shelter in his words or came to see the world differently as a consequence – and to anyone who is curious to learn more about why he mattered to us.
Let’s gather. Around someone’s kitchen table, in an artist’s studio, or a local café, or in whatever kind of pocket you can find. Let’s meet and celebrate.
We’ll use this page to share a map of gatherings and help to spread the rumour. Find others near you on the map, or add yourself as a local contact, and together we can make a truth of those words on the final page of Ways of Seeing:
“To be continued by the reader…”
— Anna Björkman & Dougald Hine
a school called HOME
Lokale Zusammenkünfte
There are wonderful events already planned to mark Berger’s centenary, and we’re happy to share the word of them.
With this invitation, we also want to make room for smaller, informal encounters.
You can use the map to find what’s happening near you – or dich als lokaler Ansprechpartner für diejenigen anmelden , die sich in deiner Gegend treffen möchten.
Scrolle über die Karte, um ein Treffen in deiner Nähe zu finden. Klicke auf den Pin, um die Beschreibung mit weiteren Details zu öffnen, darunter auch die Kontaktdaten des Veranstalters. Falls sich in deiner Region noch niemand als lokaler Ansprechpartner gemeldet hat, kannst du dich über dieses Formular anmelden..
“A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement … and unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening to the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie.”
— The Shape of a Pocket
Ein Treffen veranstalten
The promise of encounter runs through Berger’s work, even to the titles of his books: Keeping a Rendezvous, The Shape of a Pocket, Here is Where We Meet. Conversation and collaboration were at the heart of his way of being. And he said that the rooms in which he felt most at home were kitchens and artists’ studios.
We could take these things as a clue for how to gather.
Maybe you have a space you’d like to invite people into. Maybe you’re part of an organisation or a venue that could host a gathering. Maybe you’re already planning an event and we can help you spread the word.
Or maybe you’re just curious to see if there are others near you to whom Berger’s name means something and who would like to get together.
If you fill out the form, we’ll put you on the map, along with anything you’d like to tell people, and they can get in touch with you by email.
What’s the story behind this invitation?
Wir sind Dougald Hine und Anna Björkman, Mitbegründer a school called HOME– einer Schule namens HOME, einem Treffpunkt und einer Lerngemeinschaft für diejenigen, die sich von der Arbeit am Wiederaufleben einer lebendigen Kultur angezogen fühlen.
In 2012, Dougald wrote these words for the wall of an exhibition of John Berger’s archive at Somerset House in London:
“We come to a public event or an exhibition … because someone’s work has mattered to us. We sit alongside or walk past others for whom this has also been the case, but our attention is directed to the works on the wall or the people on the stage. While we are here, let us meet each other as well.”
Those lines reflect a desire born of the experience each of us had of encountering Berger through his writing.
There are certain writers who help you find your bearings, or whose words have a way of arriving like a letter from the older, wiser friend you need at just that moment.
You have the sense that anyone to whom this writer’s words have mattered is probably someone you would like to meet.
Everyone who knew Berger says he couldn’t stand hierarchy of any kind: friendship, solidarity and collaboration were the only modes of being together that his life had room for.
So in gratitude for the gifts we found in his work, and out of a hunch that new seeds will grow out of being together, we wanted to set in motion this possibility to find each other and meet.
Do I need to know lots about Berger to host a gathering?
Not at all! If you’re curious to meet others who are drawn to his work and to learn more, then you’re warmly welcome to put your hand up as a local contact.
Further down this page, you’ll find some ideas for where to start exploring Berger’s work.
Wann sollten wir unser Treffen veranstalten?
Berger’s 100th birthday falls on Thursday, 5th November, 2026.
We started with the idea of a patchwork of gatherings in the days from 5-8 November. But if there’s another date that fits your circumstances better, then go for it, and we’ll be happy to add your event to the map.
Was bedeutet es, ein lokaler Ansprechpartner zu sein?
If you sign up, then we’ll add a pin to the map with your name and email and any other details you’d like to share.
People near you can get in touch and hopefully you find a group to get together on or around the centenary.
If you have an event already planned, include the details and we’ll link to it.
Closer to the time, we’ll be in touch with everyone who has signed up as a host to check if you have further information that you’d like to share through this site.
Solltst du in der Zwischenzeit Fragen haben, kannst du dich über das Kontaktformular an uns wenden..
“I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars.”
— Confabulations
“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.”
— Miners
Who was John Berger?
Novelist, essayist, art critic, Marxist, painter, poet. Such categories are not much help in introducing him. “The categories we make between different aspects of experience … are mostly there for the convenience of liars,” his friend Ernst Fischer told him. But the label that John Berger liked the best was “storyteller”.
He rose to attention writing about art for the New Statesman in the 1950s, sparking fierce debates in the letters pages. Attention grew to fame with Ways of Seeing, the BBC TV series of 1972, the book of which became required reading at art schools. That same year, he won the Booker prize for his fourth novel, G., and shared the prize money with the Black Panthers. (Booker–McConnell had made its wealth in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.)
Soon after, he settled in the Haute Savoie where he lived and worked alongside the last generation of peasants in Western Europe, paying part of his rent by helping in the fields and the barn. When he set out to tell the stories of the village, he found the techniques of the modern novel ill-suited to the task; he had to begin again and find another way of telling. The result was the trilogy Into Their Labours.
He had been in Prague in the summer of 1968, days before the Soviet tanks rolled in. His later work was shaped by the failure of “the overall promises repeatedly made in the name of Progress” and the need to rethink solidarity and the struggle against exploitation beyond the expectations of modernity: “Suppose we say that we are not living in a world in which it is possible to construct something approaching heaven-on-earth, but … a world whose nature is far closer to that of hell,” he challenged his companions on the left.
To the end of his life, he remained engaged alongside those who find themselves on the wrong side of the walls that are built across the world. His work is full of clues for how to go on in the dark: the importance of beauty, love and friendship, generous and uncompromising creative collaboration, attention to the tender details that open onto vastness, the invisible, the ongoing presence of the dead, all that lies beyond the grasp of the enclosers.
He died in Paris on the 2nd of January, 2017. Today, a hundred years after he was born, the gifts he left us feel more necessary than ever.
