Book Launch Gathering — Mouries Collective
March 11 @fydani.space

Mouries Collective gathered with both longtime and new friends to celebrate the launch of our new publication, Picnicking Matters: Big Questions and Tiny Revelations Around Care and Healing Ecologies. Our collective, experimental book on healing, care, and community-making emerging from years of reflection and experimentation. The evening was both a celebration and an invitation to engage with the book itself.

We began by trying out several of the “scores” included in the publication, simple prompts designed to spark collective exploration around revelations, collective care, imagination, and attention. Later in the evening we spoke about the long process behind the book, zooming in Isabel Gutierrez Sanchez from Madrid, who guided the collective writing of the book through a series of workshops for writing, dialogue, and listening to one another. These encounters helped us revisit our intentions, reflect on our political positioning, and explore how our relationships, with each other and with the wider world, continue to evolve. The process was not easy, but trust, tenderness, and time brought us through moments of uncertainty, conflict, and the need to slow down.

The discussion wandered through many unexpected territories. Among other things, we talked about how female cats build relationships through touch, how bodily experiences such as circumcision can shape memory and intimacy, and about the forces that get in the way of living and working collectively. Conversations both serious, playful, tender and sometimes surprising were extensions of the book itself, and we were happy to see our work in motion.

The publication brings together voices, images, ideas, and rituals from our shared journey. Photographs from gatherings, mappings of recurring questions, and references to artists, theorists, activists, and somatic practitioners appear throughout, forming a polyphonic and living archive of our ways of working, sensing, and healing together.

Champagne glasses were raised and DJ Meandmyfriends came on. It was a joyful moment to pause, reflect on how far the collective has come, and welcome new companions into the unfolding process.