Who we are
Ephemera Collective was founded in Cyprus in 2025 by Andreas Avgousti and Andrea Papouri. It was born from a desire to do things differently: to deconstruct inherited forms, to reimagine how we live and work together, and to remain attentive to process rather than certainty.
We do not begin from the assumption that things are already clear, stable, or complete. In many ways, all we have is a process: of thinking, making, unmaking, relating, and beginning again. Ephemera grows from that condition, and from a commitment to move through it collectively and with care.
Our work stands on three simple but demanding pillars: art as a form of affection, the environment as an interdependent system of relations, and the community as a complex way of relating to each other. These are not themes we apply from outside, but ways of orienting ourselves within the work.
How We Came To Be
Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do what her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.
Brothers Grimm, “The Willful Child” (KHM 117), public-domain text.
We return to this Grimm story because it stays with us as an image of what refuses to disappear, what resists being settled, and what returns even after it has been covered over. For us, it speaks not only of disturbance, but of the persistence of what remains unresolved.
Our Values
Care is central to how we work. We understand it not only as support or attentiveness, but as a way of organizing relations, making space for interdependence, and staying responsive to complexity.
Horizontality is also important to us. We try to create ways of working in which ideas from different disciplines and lived experiences can meet without being arranged too quickly into hierarchy.
We are also guided by the idea of situated and partial knowledge. We do not believe that knowledge is neutral or universal; we understand it as something shaped by context, position, and experience.
This is connected to our attention to voices and perspectives that are often pushed to the margins. We value practices and forms of discourse that challenge dominant narratives and open space for different ways of living, knowing, and relating.