Rituals: Ancestral and Emergent Forms of Attention and Belonging
Ritual, as an intentional practice, has historically offered ways to mark time, navigate transitions, and sustain relational worlds, mediating between boundaries that modernity separates: self and other, inner and outer, human and more-than-human, life and death. We believe that the current eco-social crisis is inseparable from the erosion of practices that guide, acknowledge, express, and honor our belonging within the expanded web of life. As societies shaped by capitalism become increasingly driven by unsustainable consumption, extraction, overproduction, and individualism, the structures that cultivate attention, belonging, and care have steadily diminished. The suppression and institutionalization of ritual through colonial, political, and religious systems of control has reinforced conditions of separation, disorientation, and loss of collective meaning. In this context, the absence of ritual contributes to the weakening of the bonds that connect bodies to place, to one another, and to the living systems that sustain us as earthly beings.
We seek to research, reclaim, and reimagine ritual as a practice that restores and deepens embodied, situated, and relational ways of living — practices that can be collectively created and infused with shared meaning and purpose. We turn toward embodied and place-based forms of attention that move beyond abstract and intellectualized modes of relating, fostering deeper connection, emotional awareness, and ecological stewardship. We are interested in exploring how ritual operates through body and mind, and how gestures, repetition, rhythm, and symbolic action can shift perception, re-membering the body as a primary site of knowledge, relation, and creation. This work requires careful and accountable engagement with existing traditions without extraction, remaining attentive to the communities and contexts in which rituals continue to live and evolve, while resisting contemporary tendencies to depoliticize, commodify, or appropriate them.
Through our research, we will engage with a range of practices and lineages of ritual, with particular attention to the local context, tracing what has endured through witch hunts, colonial violence, religious suppression, and the dislocations of modernity. We are interested both in everyday gestures of attentive engagement with the present moment and in the practices that sustain life and nurture community. Through readings, interviews, archive research, film screenings, workshops, walks, gatherings, embodied exercises, and collective experiments, we will explore practices connected to seasonal cycles, memory, place-based knowledge, and ecological interdependence. We aim to investigate ritual as a means of accessing creativity, the erotic, rites of passage, mourning, and forms of urban and more-than-human ecology. Alongside these activities, we will develop and test methods for creating, adapting, documenting and sustaining rituals over time, exploring how shared practices can cultivate continuity, collective responsibility, and regenerative forms of belonging.
Some areas of research
- Ritual as sustained attention within the present
- Ritual as resistance to capitalist time
- Ritual as maintenance of relational worlds
- Ritual as container for grief, joy, healing and transformation
- Ritual as something we can create
- Ritual as collective care
- Ritual in everyday places
- Ritual as a bridge between past and present
EVENTS Rituals: Ancestral and Emergent Forms of Attention and Belonging
Vessel of Pollinators
The Pollen of Magic
Mouries is collaborating with Fourthland, a collective initiated by artists Isik and Eva, on this multiyear project. The Vessel of Pollinators is an embodiment of attunement, heightening the senses to the ecosystems within and around us. It is for those seeking to create heart-centered change—through art, service, and deep connection to community.
This collective project is a space for transformation, bringing together ceremony and the mysteries woven into our shared psyche. It is a call to those who feel the interconnectedness of all life and wish to serve the planet and each other.
Guided by dreamwork, vision quests, and social practice, the project cultivates leadership from the heart, weaving personal mythology into the world. This journey supports the integration of sacred practice within a greater whole, fostering transformation on both individual and collective levels.
We will explore magic, healing, and transformation through art and ceremony, crafting a project that expands creative expression into the world. Together, we form an ecosystem—roots intertwining, branching into authenticity.
For magic thrives in connection, nourishment, and shared creation.
Both of our current projects are kindly supported by Necessity.
Mouries Collective 