Illich at 100
4-6 September, 2026 • Around the world
“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied, it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand. On the other hand, radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.”
Join us to celebrate the life of Ivan Illich on the weekend of what would have been his hundredth birthday.
Whether you are a newcomer to his work, a long-time reader or anywhere in between, this is an invitation to find those who are gathering near you – or host a gathering of your own.
The life and work of Ivan Illich (1926-2002) has been an ongoing source of inspiration, provocation and enlivening trouble to us at a school called HOME. Over the years, we’ve had the chance to get to know many of his surviving friends and co-conspirators, and to trace the widely varying currents of influence that run onwards from the work he was involved in.
So much of Illich’s thinking had to do with scale and proportion, the possibilities that are lost to us when our lives are organised in ways that are too big or too fast for the kind of creatures we are. So when we decided to organise a celebration of his centenary, it seemed appropriate to invite a scattering of human-scale gatherings, rather than a big central event.
“Even before my first Bremen semester started, Barbara Duden got a house in the Ostertor Viertel, beyond the old moat, just down from the drug corner, the farmers’ market, and the Turkish quarter. There Barbara created an ambiance of austere playfulness. The house became a place that at the drop of a hat accommodates our guests. If, after my lecture on Fridays, the spaghetti bowl must feed more than the two dozen who fit around the table made from flooring timber, guests squat on Mexican blankets in the next room.”