Terrestrial Tales
Illustrations by Hugo Ars
Terrestrial Tales is a collective of artists, designers, architects, and curators working with storytelling and the land.
Operating as a series of traveling workshops that bring together different groups of individuals to collect narratives from the evolving conditions of a terrain, each chapter of the series is set in a different location, either urban or rural, and at the end of every gathering the collected geographic stories—expressed through maps, drawings, writings, and other works—are compiled into a publication that is gradually building towards a broader anthology.
Terrestrial Tales held its first chapter at the Arkhé Project in Şirince, Turkey, in July 2023, realised in collaboration with writer and editor Ecem Arslanay, editor-in-chief of Art Unlimited Merve Akar Akgün, architect and writer Silvana Taher, and photographer Silva Bingaz, together with 10 participants. The second edition took place in Athens, Greece, in September 2025.
It also takes the form of a monthly feature on the online platform of Art Unlimited, where the project aims to gather stories from artists, curators, and practitioners from diverse disciplines around the world—removing the limitation of having to be in the same physical space.
The stories that we tell ourselves about the land matter and affect how we engage with the world around us. Terrestrial Tales use both intuitive and critical methods to encourage a deeper, more layered understand of human and natural environments.
Terrestrial Tales was founded by Mina Gursel and its current members, alongside Mina, are Hugo Ars, Valentina Bacci, Nikolaos Akritidis, Dilan Bozer, and Ruby Kester.
Terrestrial Tales Chapter 2: Athens
2025
The Sun; My Eye, 2025, Workshop by Ruby Kester, Terrestrial Tales Ch2: Athens
The Sun; My Eye, 2025, Workshop by Ruby Kester, Terrestrial Tales Ch2: Athens
The Sun; My Eye, 2025, Workshop by Ruby Kester, Terrestrial Tales Ch2: Athens
The Sun; My Eye, 2025, Workshop by Ruby Kester, Terrestrial Tales Ch2: Athens
The Sun; My Eye, 2025, Workshop by Ruby Kester, Terrestrial Tales Ch2: Athens
The Sun; My Eye, 2025, Workshop by Ruby Kester, Terrestrial Tales Ch2: Athens
The Sun; My Eye, 2025, Workshop by Ruby Kester, Terrestrial Tales Ch2: Athens
Terrestrial Tales: Chapter 2 was a week-long programme of workshops, artist talks, museum visits, film screenings and discussions based in Athens in 2025. This programme was carefully curated by the whole Terrestrial Tales team over the course of a year, designed to engage team members and participants alike with the collective’s central themes of story telling, history, and ecology.
Alongside organising the programme with the team, Ruby Kester ran ‘The Sun; My Eye’, a workshop looking at using poetry, drawing, and cyanotype print making to record impressions of the land. Through direct interaction with found materials and the natural resource that is the sun, participants were encouraged to merge the real and the non-real, fiction and non-fiction, resulting in a large-scale collaborative collage of cyanotypes, organic matter, drawings, and the written word.
