RITUALISING TOGETHERNESS

For the sixth edition of Desert Lab, LIOS invited 30 artists, researchers, and agents of transformation to the Błędowska Desert for a three-week world-building residency dedicated to collective dwelling, ecological attunement, and ritual practice. Participants were asked to offer their full presence in building and dismantling the structures that held our temporary community — an invitation to learn through labour, intimacy, and shared responsibility.

In 2025, Desert Lab continued to refine its curriculum by essentialising the camp layout and cultivating a way of working inspired by murmurations: moving as a flock, practicing effortless action, and attuning to the rhythms of the land.

Through this work we explore what it means to build and unbuild together. We learn how our actions shape the environment and how the environment shapes us. We step away from capitalist models of delegated labour and embrace the joy of communal making — sometimes twerk’n while we work — always striving to leave each place better than we found it.

The Lab deepens ecological and somatic learning through open-source practices: listening through the body, recognising plant allies, dancing with fire, and following the shifts of sun, wind, and sand. What emerges is a collective story of reciprocity, interbeing, and shared care, co-authored with more-than-human kin.

Desert Lab is held in service to the land: to a desert longing to rewild, to forests wanting to remain whole, and to humans learning to remember. It is a practice of living together — humbly, joyfully, and in devotion to our Earth.