Picnicking Matters: Big questions and tiny revelations around care and healing ecologies

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 have been exploring collectivity, care, and experimental knowledge-making through artistic and community-based practices. Now, we want to share our reflections, tools, challenges, and hopes in the form of a book.

Picnicking Matters is the outcome of a long process of collective reflection, writing, dialogue, and attentive listening. It is a polyphonic and experimental publication that gathers stories, conversations, images, exercises, and questions that have emerged through our work together. The book explores what it means—and what it takes—to build and sustain a collective in times of social, ecological, and cultural uncertainty.

Across five chapters, we share a living archive of our practices: a lexicon of key concepts, personal interviews, reflections on collective needs and desires, experiences of failure and resilience, and conversations with friends and collaborators who have accompanied our journey.

Beautifully designed and interwoven with images, mappings, and references that have nourished our work, the book invites readers to navigate it freely. Like a picnic, it is open, shared, and exploratory.

This publication is for artists, caregivers, activists, researchers, and anyone interested in care, healing, and community-making. If our questions and practices resonate with you, we warmly invite you to support this project and help bring the book into the world.