Fermenting Care Ethics and Practices of Collective Survival
At EIGHT / ΤΟ ΟΧΤΩ critical laboratory for arts and politics
Athens, Greece
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.
A River Welcomes Us by Mouries presented a sequence of rituals to connect with our bodies in the city of Athens. Listening with intention to our voices, to the city and the river’s voices, we sared ways of relating and care. During our walk we followed 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 morning concluded with a shared reflection and picnic in the park of Probonas. This offering is created in collaboration with Penny Travlou.
Mouries walk and rituals by the river were complimented with presenation by Xezal Özvarış: Archives of Doubly Disappeared Women and Elli Vassalou: On Lost Love and Lost Land
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 labor 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 theorizing and analyzing 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 presented on Teresa Brennen and among other topcis her ground breaking yet mostly overlook and forgotten seminal work The transmission of Affect was well as her work on rituals, In addition workshops by Marina Bikou: Lives Out of Rhythm: Trauma, Affect, and the Search for Repair in Humanitarian Contexts, Pamela Merrill Silva Monstrous Writings Laboratory: Micro-apocalypses, Active Desire, & Fiction and Micol Pizzolati : Re-drawing Collective Care
Breathing along with Others with Christina Grammatikopoulou with guest Cornelia Sollfrank was acccompanied by workshops by Anna Tzako: The Land Score – Performative Acts of Landscape as Practices of Self, Community, and Kinship with the More-Than-Human towards a feminist postcolonial approach to site-specific performance and Ilenia Cipolari: Resisting the Script: Voice, Exhaustion, and the Pacing of Care
Mouries Collective 