A collective, experimental book on healing, care, and community-making.
We are Mouries Collective, a women-led arts and research group based in Athens, Greece. Over the past five years, we’ve been nurturing a collaborative practice rooted in collectivity, care, and experimental knowledge-making. Now, we want to share our reflections, tools, struggles, and hopes in the form of a book.
This publication is the result of a long process of collective reflection. It began with a series of workshops designed to open space for writing, dialogue, and attentive listening. These encounters allowed us to explore our internal dynamics, revisit our intentions and political positioning, and reflect on how our relationships – among ourselves and with others – have evolved.
Throughout this process, we welcomed not only insights and inspiration, but also moments of uncertainty, emotional weight, and the need to slow down. This book carries all of that: the thinking, the feeling, the pauses, the contradictions. The result is a polyphonic, situated, and experimental publication: a living archive of our ways of working, thinking, sensing, and healing together. It is a shared attempt to articulate what it means – and what it takes – to become and remain a collective in times of social, ecological, and cultural breakdown.
What’s inside the book? Picnicking Matters unfolds over five main chapters, each offering unique perspectives on collective practice, care, and healing from our specific position as a feminist, arts-based group in Greece:
Finding Our Words: A lexicon-in-the-making: poetic, personal, and theoretical reflections on key concepts that shape our practice. Each word is accompanied by embodied “scores” or prompts to invite deeper engagement.
Offerings: A series of interviews with each member of Mouries about the personal contributions made during Healing Exercises. Each conversation is followed by suggested integration practices – ways to reflect, digest, and activate the insights.
Why Are You Here? A chapter of intimate responses to the titular question, interwoven with collective commentary. It maps personal and shared needs, struggles, joys, and visions for the future of our collective.
Failures & Desires: We share a failed funding application – an honest gesture toward the invisible labor of sustaining a feminist arts collective in precarious conditions. It also reveals how we articulate our politics, practices, and hopes.
Dinner with Friends: Based on a community “brain trust” session following the screening of Glimpses of Healing, Mending and Rewilding, this chapter reflects on the feedback, tensions and aspirations that emerged when friends and collaborators looked at Mouries from the outside in.
Carefully edited and beautifully designed, the book functions as a container for the voices, images, concepts, and rituals that have emerged from our journey. Interwoven throughout the book are images from our gatherings, mappings of recurring ideas and questions, and references to artists, theorists, activists, and somatic practitioners who have nourished our work.
Importantly, this book isn’t meant to be read in a straight line. It’s more like a picnic – open, shared, exploratory. You’re invited to navigate it in your own way.
This book is a labor of love and a reflection of collective resilience. It’s for artists, caregivers, activists, researchers, and anyone exploring how to build intentional communities in complex times. If our questions, experiences, and tools resonate with you, we warmly invite you to support this project. Let’s keep weaving stories, practices, and solidarities together – one picnic at a time.
To order a copy please contact us at mouriescollective@gmail.com
Mouries Collective 