summary: The ^ collective will be visiting Varia at the end of June. This visit is a follow-up from last November, when a few Varia members visited ^ in Ireland to take part in the Irish Design Week, and get to know the collective and their local network. During their time in Rotterdam, we aim to re-explore our local landscape, infrastructure and networks informed by our different migration backgrounds, focusing on our solidarity network, paths of access to local resources and the support structures that sustain the cultural sector in Rotterdam. On Tuesday the 25th, we will have a day of collective reflection and a chance to get to know ^, where everyone is invited to discuss and have a drink.
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The ^ collective will be visiting Varia at the end of June. This visit is a follow-up from last November, when a few Varia members visited ^ in Ireland to take part in the Irish Design Week, and get to know the collective and their local network. During their time in Rotterdam, we aim to re-explore our local landscape, infrastructure and networks informed by our different migration backgrounds, focusing on our solidarity network, paths of access to local resources and the support structures that sustain the cultural sector in Rotterdam. On Tuesday the 25th, we will have a day of collective reflection and a chance to get to know ^, where everyone is invited to discuss and have a drink.
^ are a collective based in Manorhamilton, Leitrim. Their human bodies are porous, as are the walls and floors of the spaces they inhabit. Within these spaces, they come together to share ideas and experiment. Together they have a broad range of media, concepts and experience in their practices. They develop experimental collaborations using art as a method of research and presentation. ^ are Tara Baoth Mooney, Shane Finan, James Kelly and Laura McMorrow.
Baoth Mooney's practice moves between visual art, performance and music, and her recent PhD work has researched ecopsychosocial relationships of care through textile in human-human contexts. Finan's work is assembled from interactive digital media and includes organising events and collaborating with universities, museums, artists, fungi, lichen, birds, ants and trees. Kelly experiments with the rural landscape, developing works in a posthuman relationship with land and dreamscape. McMorrow has a mixed media practice, primarily painting and collage, and leads community-facing educational and collaborative projects.
In 2022, they began working on a project that considered grief and the ritual of the wake, called Waking the Land. This considered environmental grief from the perspective of Benbo Mountain, the closest mountain to Manorhamilton, where prospecting licences for heavy metal mining were handed out by the Irish state in 2022. They were inspired by philosopher Judith Butler and her writings about the need to establish ‘grievability’ in relation to people, places, living organisms and environments. They were taken with Butler advocating that: ...in order to value any of these things we must be willing to grieve their loss. And in order to grieve, we must value something enough before we lose it. You can read more about their work here: [waking.land](https://waking.land/)
