Emerging from the previous project Fire Pit Space, The Collective Fire Pits (TCFP) unfolds as a shared artistic project, with the “fire pit” as a medium and space of invitation, gathering, storytelling, imagination, and archiving. It welcomes diverse bodies, practices, and stories to come together and collectively build and imagine different fire pits.

Combined with Sara Ahmed's views in Feminist Shelters, if women's thinking and knowledge can be seen as the “feminist bricks” that build a “house”, then can storytelling and sharing around the fire, based on the matrilineal principle, also be seen as “feminist branches”?

From the primal fire where stories were first shared between mountains and fields, to the fire pits in the ancestral rooms of matrilineal villages by Lugu Lake, where the spirits of ancestors reside, to the communal bonfire pits of collective communities where “many hands gather wood”. Around the matriarchal principles centred on sharing, regeneration, love, community, reciprocity, balance, the gift economy, and sacred life ignite, different stories ignite different fires, constructing different fire-pit "houses", bright or dim, large or small, all ultimately contributing to the collective fire pit.

This collective fire pit space carries our imagination of narratives outside patriarchy, and also our exploration of “common futurisms” – it is a starting point, a space that allows us to conceive and practice a more equal lifestyle, a space that accommodates change.