Sapphic Roots Collective is a queer collective of diasporic activists raised in Greece, engaged in feminist activism, archival work, and community organizing across Greece and Germany. We aim to build bridges between queer communities across the Mediterranean diaspora, strengthening translocal networks rooted in shared herstories, migration, and collective care. Our work resists gentrification and extractive development, which disproportionately harm marginalized communities.
We are in the process of establishing a queer community center on Lesvos that will serve as both a social space and an archive of the local lesbian* community, fostering belonging, grassroots knowledge, creativity, and collaboration. By preserving local lesbian* and queer herstories, we aim to strengthen resilience against gentrification and displacement while creating new forms of belonging.
The activities we organize are part of this ongoing process of building the space, its community, and its archive. Through queer-feminist filmmaking, drag king workshops, oral herstory projects, queer youth education, feminist reading groups, art exhibitions, and the preservation of queer archives, we cultivate grassroots knowledge production, intergenerational exchange, and collective care. These activities not only shape the future community center but also strengthen local and translocal queer networks, ensuring that the space emerges from the needs, herstories, and creative practices of the communities it serves.
Our projects are developed collaboratively with members of other queer feminist collectives and grassroots initiatives, reflecting our commitment to solidarity, shared resources, and collective organizing. These collaborations contribute to the formation of this emerging community space while expanding its reach across local and diasporic queer communities. Current collaborative initiatives include:
Sweaty Theories : a collaboration between Sapphic Roots Collective, Magnolia Residency and Theros Transfeminist Lab. An invitation-only transfeminist gathering that brings together theory, performance, workshops, film screenings, poetry, photography, and embodied practices in a sex-positive, body-positive, trans-inclusive, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist space. Rooted in the belief that theory can transform the ways we feel, dream, move, sweat, desire, and relate to one another, Sweaty Theories invited participants to explore ideas through collective experimentation, creativity, and care while fostering new collaborations, grassroots knowledge production, and collective forms of queer and transfeminist world-making.
The initiation of a Drag King School : a collaboration betweenSapphic Roots Collective andTheros Transfeminist Lab, creating a space for performance, experimentation, community building, and gender expression.
A documentary film on Eressos : a collaboration between Sapphic Roots Collective, Nionia Films, and Theros Transfeminist Lab, exploring the herstories, memories, and contemporary realities of lesbian and queer life on Lesvos.
