Islands of Conviviality

In early autumn 2026, a small research procession departs from Split, the ancient Roman coastal city, and crosses the seas between Brač, Hvar, and Vis: three islands that each, in their own way, host ways of living away from the mainland. We eventually arrive on Vis, an insular territory with a deep history of refuge and autonomous actions.

We travel together also to explore the legacy of Ivan Illich (born September 4th 1926), a Croatian-Austrian thinker who, through his best-known writings—Medical Nemesis, Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality—posed generative challenges to the industrial-modern institutions that still presume themselves to be ‘indispensable.’ Illich insisted on environmental health, offered a vocabulary for institutional alterity, and emphasised the importance of technology as convivial tools rather than as deterministic fate. In the year of his 100th birthday, we gather in and between places that shaped his life and thinking, as only “one month after his birth he was put on a train, and then on a ship and brought to the Island of Brač.”

Now, amid collapsing international orders, infrastructures of “openness,” technopolitical fascism penetrating all spheres of life, and a climate that is changing everything—many of Illich’s questions land with new urgencies. Islands of Conviviality treats these not as the inheritance or heroism of one thinker but as situated invitations to think and act with hosts, guests, visitors, local humans and nonhumans, landscapes, ecologies, others.