Athens, 2025
As de:border // migration justice collective and Missing Migrant Lesvos, we invited a community space with the hope to make (and take) space to be with our feelings, hold them together, make sense of and respond to violence and harm otherwise. We sought to centre healing and transformative justice as ways of knowing and being with violence, while decentring the state’s tools of law and evidence that only serve to entrench its power and perpetuate harm. We wanted to be(come) an ‘us’ that collectively grounds, re-members and resources each other and together through collective liberatory practices, such as grief tending, while critically approaching our differential positionalities and response-abilities.
We were longing to practice collective care as a form of justice, not only to counter our sense of political defeat that causes our (recurrent) burnout, but to collectivise and strengthen our defiance of state violence through our demands and visions of justice as ‘just us’.
For five online meetings and four days in person, we gathered as a group (of 23 online and 15 in person) to hold space and time for our individual and collective rage and grief. Guided by somatic and embodiment practices, reflective prompts and co-created resources (many of which we share in this zine), we sought to make space for being, letting go and getting lost – without agendas or outputs.
This zine hopes to offer a glimpse into this time and space, and the precious encounters and sense of togetherness that persists within and between us. It shares some of our co-created programmes, resources, prompts and reflections on some of our embodied experiences and knowledges around community care and justice for border deaths and disappearances.
If this space and resource inspires you, and you are considering or holding similar circles, warmly invite connection around this with us and others from this community space (not named here for safety considerations). Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at info@debordercollective.org.
To print the zine, you can access a print-friendly version of it here.
The zine is in the process of being translated into Arabic, Greek, Italian and French. We will add each of the translations to this page as they become available. Feel free to get in touch if you would like us to let us know when a specific version is ready.