Events

Fermenting Care

Ethics and Practices

of Collective Survival

Friday June 12- Sunday June 14

At EIGHT / ΤΟ ΟΧΤΩ

critical laboratory

for arts and politics

Athens, Greece

Applications for participation have closed.

Mouries Collective is emerging into a new research on ritual, as a practice that creates space with intention. Historically, ritual has provided ways to mark time, hold transitions and sustain relational worlds, negotiating and bridging borders within realms that modernity often presents as distinct: self and others, internal and external, human and more-than-human, life and death.

Wishing to research, reclaim and re-imagine ritual as a practice that restores and deepens embodied, situated and relational ways of living, we seek forms that can be collectively created and infused with meaning and purpose.

We will present a sequence of rituals to connect with our bodies in the city of Athens. Trying to listen with intention to our voices, to the city and the river’s voices, we will share ways of relating and care. During our walk we will follow the stories of the city, moving attentively through moments of transition, relating to and extending our bond with the human and non-human inhabitants of the stream through history, ritual and sharing. Our evening will conclude at sunset with a shared reflection and picnic in the park of Probonas. This offering is created in collaboration with Penny Travlou.

How can we disentangle care from its transactional value to imagine possibilities of collective support that go beyond state-sanctioned ideas of how we should care, who does the caring, and who receives care? In this series of conjunctures, we want to move beyond conventional ideas of care to explore the creative, sensual and sensorial, yet often invisible and immaterial aspects of care. 

We turn to creative practices that explore possibilities between human and non-human symbiosis while challenging the very notion of what counts as aesthetic production when it has no object-oriented outcome. We examine how everyday rituals can be considered as both a form of labour as well as care for oneself and one’s community: from the labour of upkeeping communal resources and shared archives to the overwhelming administration of performing the rituals that come with celebrating life or mourning death. We are interested in theorising and analysing but also putting into effect the many ways that our interconnections can provide us with an ethics of living well. We even dig a little deeper to examine psychic explorations of care by turning to the less explored field of psychoanalytic ecofeminism and what it unravels in relation to how we treat and perceive the natural environment. 

The workshop will also include Ecofeminism between Affect & Psychoanalysis with Diana Georgiou with invited guest Lauren Guilmette and Breathing along with Others with Christina Grammatikopoulou with guest Cornelia Sollfrank

INVITATION TO JOIN US

for a magical

3 day experience

The HIVE

Our Place on Earth

2 – 4 July 2026

The Quadrangle

Kent, UK

A special multimedia gathering exploring reconnection and healing, cultivating exchanges of knowledge, imagination,empowerment and connection. Join us to awaken deeper relationships with the earth, through creative expression. For 3 days we will occupy an installation of The Hive and playfully move between workshops, talks, ceremony, performance and a range of fire side, river side and land based experiences.

We will gather with The Hive and the exhibition to explore: how to love, how to care, how to grieve, how to feel joy, how to heal, how to come back home to our nature. Allowing the symbol of the bee to inspire notions of collectivity and our role as change-makers to pollinate and spread the energy of hope.

Places are available to join us for camping, to join for the day or to support us to hold the space by becoming a householder.

Produced and curated by Fourthland

Mouries Collective in collaboration with 15 international artists:

  • Patricia Brien
  • Magi Winmill-Hermann
  • Sarah Dark
  • Jessica Eichman
  • Annabie Daly
  • Cat Rogers
  • Aga Tamiola
  • Clare Carr-Saunders
  • Serazer Pekerman
  • Mireia Bes
  • Maria Juliana Byck
  • Telma Leamaro Antunes
  • Kirsty Whiten
  • Eliana Otta
  • Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki

2 – 4 July The Quadrangle Kent in the UK

Limited tickets available MORE INFORMATION AND TICKETS

PicNic Manifesto

ongoing activity

in Athens Public Spaces

During the last years, we are experiencing an increasing threat of privatization over Athenian public spaces. Presented as “renovations”, “embellishments”, “hygienization”, “defense of order”, or plainly as plans for tourism attractions. These diverse interventions on parks and hills reduce their green areas and aim to limit their usage, accommodating it to profiting schemes and to a view of the city that disregards its inhabitants’ vital needs.

Amidst this contested scenario, picnics emerge as a convoking and resisting quotidian activity that refreshes the air and renovates our possibilities to experience public space as a joyful common. We invite you to help us write a Picnic Manifesto! How do picnics materialize our views of the type of city where we want to live? How do they express our views on coexistence, welcomeness and sharing?

The first Picnic Manifesto was at Akadimia Platonos Park, adding to the many actions being done to support the park’s existence as it is, against the cutting of 314 trees and the invasion of bulldozers and cement. The second was in Strefi Hill Exarchia, November, 2023.

This will be an ongoing Mouries’ activity at various parks in the city. Bring friends and whatever you’d like to share (fruits? ideas? cookies? questions?) We look forward to see you there!