Independence is a slippery and iinherently relative concept – independence from what? A large, somewhat blurry range of answers was on offer at The State of Independence Shall Be, the latest event in LIFT 2014’s Change for a Tenner season of events dedicated to people and ideas inculcating change in society. The night focused on those who, one way or another, have unilaterally opted out of the standard social, political or economic framework. “Is what they do changing the world, or just escaping from it?”, the programme asked. Good question – though the opportunities to answer it were limited. There was still plenty to chew on, however, with the second half proving particularly rewarding.

Sam Berkson hosted the first half (as did at an earlier session in the season, With the Lights Out It’s Less Dangerous). He opened the event by noting our proximity to a couple of locales that could be considered as microstate territory: St Paul’s Cathedral, around which the Occupy encampment experimented for a year with another way of living; and the City of London itself, which remains a polity distinct from the rest of the capital and even, in some regards, the Crown. Berkson might also have dwelled on the event's setting, Wilton’s Music Hall itself: the music-hall tradition, oscillating as it did between the carnivalesque and the jingoistic, offered both respite from and reinforcement of state power.

The first half of the evening had some of the strengths and weaknesses I felt were evident in other Change for a Tenner events that I’ve seen. The strengths included fascinating subject matter delivered by a very smartly curated bunch of speakers; the weaknesses included a sense of information overload with too little opportunity for discussion beyond standard-format Q&A slots, and occasionally underwhelming public speaking.

First up was a half-hour audio presentation from In the Dark, a network of radio producers and fans who stage ‘live-listening’ events, playing radio features with the lights down low for a live audience. Not knowing much about this area, the obvious comparison to my mind was This American Life, with which the work shared a mode of atmospheric, heavily authored storytelling about contemporary social-cultural issues. The main piece – about street performer Clyde Casey, who, in the 1980s, transformed a run-down Los Angeles gas station into an oasis for homeless and other out-of-sorts souls [Another Planet on Skid Row, LA] – was engrossing and on point. For my money, that was enough sitting passively in the dark for an event supposedly about stimulating connections, but another handful of pieces followed.

Then we heard from Dan Hancox, whose book The Village Against the World describes the history of Marinaleda, a pueblo in southern Spain that spent 15 years after Franco’s death campaigning to constitute itself as a collective society, and finally succeeded. It’s now doing considerably better than the rest of the austerity-ravaged country. Hancox efficiently, accessibly surveyed his fascinating subject.

He was followed by Susan Steed, one of the creators of the alternative currency intended for localised use known as the Brixton pound – an intriguing but (to an economic Luddite like myself) quite complex and confusing concept. I'm afraid I didn’t have a much better understanding of it by the end of Steed’s talk. The first half’s final speaker was Lise Autogena, who delivered a punchy and evocatively-illustrated history of her experiences living in several small alternative communities, including Copenhagen’s Christiania.

These were stimulating and provocative subjects all, with potential to shed light on each other in fascinating ways. But the format of the evening allowed for only a brief interrogation of the ideas in question, and barely any consideration of how they might relate to one another. It would have been interesting to hear Hancox and Autogena discuss in detail what happens when the founding generation of a breakaway movement faces the transfer of power to the next generation. And Steed seemed to me to hit on the essence of the whole night when she noted that the idea of the Brixton pound was "not to be independent but to make apparent our codependence". But the idea passed in examined.

It was in the evening’s second half, hosted by Sally Jenkinson, that things got really interesting. Each of the four speakers was a representative of a self-declared microstate or other kind of pseudo-autonomous political entity purportedly beyond ordinary state control. They were all white men but otherwise quite distinctive, and each spoke for five minutes before they all took questions.

Mike Harding, in a collarless white shirt and black jacket (his day job is running a record label), is ambassador to the UK from the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, a realm with two kings that claims dominion over liminal spaces physical (such as the zones between passport-control stations at airports), psychological (such as conditions of hypnosis, inebriation or orgasm) and digital. Harding castigated as "bollocks", with considerable historical evidence, the presumption that a claim to kingship should rest on genealogy.

King Adam I wore a neat side parting, dark sleeveless pullover on top of a tartan shirt, chinos and slip-on loafers. Born in Hampshire, he was the monarch of Kemetia, an exercise in miniature nation-building provoked in 2005 by outrage over the Iraq debacle. Kemetia was recognised by Jordan, Taiwan, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo but grew into a project beyond the confines of statehood – a vehicle for the instigation of a ‘people’s planet’ conceived along radical lines that seemed to combine elements of collectivity and libertarianism and are so far best illustrated by unilateral action taken to salt icy roads in winter when the local council wouldn’t.

Alexei Monroe was rocking a look best described as fascist-casual: SS-friendly blond short back and sides, fitted grey shirt, high-waisted tight black trousers and black shoes. He represented NSK State, an offshoot of the subversive 1980s Slovenian art movement Neue Slowenische Kunst, which took the failings of the Yugoslavian project as the springboard for a project predicated on the “awareness that utopian experiments can go very, very wrong”. Although it apes the trappings – and to an extent stakes a claim to the power assumed by – the state as conventionally conceived, NSK State does not in fact see itself as a nation, micro or otherwise, but an internationalist movement on a par with but different from normal states. And it certainly doesn't seem fascist but radically free-thinking.

The show was stolen, though, by Emperor Jonathan of Austenasia, teenage scion of the micronation that began in 2008 as a one-house state when Jonathan and his dad informed Gordon Brown by post of their breakaway status. Jonathan wrote up their declaration of independence, which, he admitted, had a few spelling errors: “I was 13 at the time.” He related how, from a single home, Austenasia had gone on to claim territory – tiny parcels of it, but still – on all continents except Asia and Antarctica, and had already suffered a civil war (unbloody except for a nose bleed cause by a stumble). At first evincing a slightly awkward air and clad in a shiny double-breasted suit, silver tie and checked shirt, he seemed a plausible royal pretender. As he spoke, however, his combination of self-effacing wit and weapons-grade geekery made clear that he has something like star power. If he told Austenasia’s story as an Edinburgh show, he’d clean up.

Even with this more integrated panel format, however, it felt as though we were barely able to dig below the surface of the telling and compelling subject of small-scale secession. As interesting as much of the material in the first half was, I’d have preferred to see this fascinating panel unpack at more length the ins and outs of their various approaches, from the playful to the deadly serious. It was amazing to hear how exponentially most of them had grown, for instance, and the different ways that Kemetia and NSK State had set their sights beyond nationhood in favour of something more universal. All the same, the event made it brilliantly plain and even inspirational to see that the spirit of independence - whatever that might be - is alive, kicking and beautifully weird.

Read our interview with co-curator Charlie Tims here. Find out more about Change for a Tenner! here. Follow the hashtags for updates - and make yourself heard #LIFTChange #LIFT2014

Read our reviews of the other events from the series:
Children of the Revolution. Reviewed by Ben Walters [17 June 2014]
With the lights out it’s less dangerous. Reviewed by Ben Walters [17 June 2014]
Some people think I’m bonkers, but I just think I’m free. Reviewed by Ben DeVere [24 June 2014]
Change for a Tenner finale: Who Wants to Be? by The People Speak. Reviewed by Ben Walters [1 July 2014]

Change for a Tenner! is curated by Charlie Tims, Shelagh Wright and Peter Jenkinson. Producing Assistant Alicia Graf. Commissioned by LIFT and supported by Festivals in Transition - Global City Local, Imagine 2020, and House on Fire networks, with support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

LIFT commissioned Run-Riot to report on the Change for a Tenner! series.