Our 2025 Program
Our 2024 Presenters
Join Hini Hanara and Victoria Spence for a fascinating discussion of the intersections between queerness, death and dying and de-colonisation.
This interactive workshop explores how objects serve as vessels for memory, ritual, and the liminal space between life and death.
The workshop investigates how such objects embody the tension between physical decay and spiritual transcendence, and invites participants to share their own talismans of loss, from perfume bottles that once belonged to loved ones to seemingly mundane items imbued with extraordinary grief. Together, we'll examine how these material witnesses help us navigate the ineffable experience of mourning across cultural boundaries.
The Five Remembrances wake us up to the importance of how we care for ourselves and others as we grow older, experience changes in our health and relationships, grieve for what we love and lose, and, finally, face into our own death. They ask us to honor what and who really matters in our one precious life. They invite us to listen and learn by heart, to share the wonder and wisdom of compassionate practice.
Considered to be among the foundational teachings of Buddhism, we will go beyond a conceptual understanding to bring these five facts of life into our everyday awareness and actions. Embracing their truth encourages and supports us to live with greater intimacy: to act, speak, touch, and love one another in ways that deeply reflect an understanding of constant change, freeing us to be more alive and present.
This workshop is inspired by the work of Frank Ostaseski.
My intention is to use my body as a site of memory — to examine how historical events have been carried and moulded within me — and to share the legacy of sacrifice left by our ancestors. Our work is an act of witnessing: tender, unsettled, and insistently present.
No more Hiroshima
No more Nagasaki
No more wars
If you could put your grief into the weight of clay, what would that feel like? In this workshop, you will be able to create a Kopi, a traditional mourning cap that is made out of clay and worn on the head. It is traditionally worn after a loss all day every day, anywhere from a couple of weeks, months or until it falls off your head. This experience of creating and wearing your Kopi will allow you to express and feel the weight of grief. That grief can be anything from losing a loved one, loss of land, language or cultural practices, which are all things to be mourned. Please bring leaves, flowers, ash, or any other natural material to represent your grief on your Kopi.
People are looking for simpler, more natural and cost effective alternatives to burial. Land is finite and burial is often too expensive for many Australians. Shrouded cremation and human composting are new modes of body deposition that are becoming increasing popular around the world. Come and learn more about them and how we can implement them as available choices?
We all know a little more than we think, when it comes to caring for each other. In communities, we have been serving each other in death for thousands of years and this workshop is an invitation to consider what that means to us today. We will come together to consider what home funeral is, what it could look like and how we can pool our wisdom to help make it happen for each other.
Worn Grief: Interlaced approaches to wearing your loss, will bring perspectives from several key bodies of work from the facilitators, including Maree Clarke’s, “Ritual and Ceremony”, and “Grief Garments” led by Pia Interlandi and Hini Hanara.
Following a discussion where the facilitators will draw on their practices, they will host an interlaced workshop for participants where, together, we will explore what it means to wear what we have lost and to wear what we live without.
Participants will be requested to bring a light coloured t-shirt to transform, along with a sentimental object and portrait of a person, pet, or place they grieve.
In our hyper-individualist culture, an enormous burden today is put on families and individuals to do what in the past was done by whole communities. If it is true that it takes a village to bring up a child, it also takes one to support a person who is dying or grieving. For the Saturday evening of the festival, we want to cultivate village-mindedness by curating a diverse array of offerings, experiences, testimonies and performances, which do justice to the spectrum of what it is to be mortal with others on Gadigal land in 2024.
The closing ceremony will be an opportunity to gather the whole festival together at sunset and will involve a water departure at the Rushcutters' Bay jetty.
Join us for a group ritual to heal, to open our hearts, and to free up energy so we can respond in wise and loving ways. Our bodies are instruments of energy and love. Many of us are experiencing trauma, outrage, fear, grief, despair, numbness… all of these are natural human responses to our crises. This ritual is an invitation to release what is eating at our soul.
The art forms of poetry and music have profound ways of relating to mortality, death and the departed as well as to the feelings of grief and mourning. We find solace in a musical lament, which subtly transfigures our emotion of grief. In reading an elegiac poem we find ourselves able to dwell mindfully with an experience of loss. Living poets and composers are often inspired by deceased artists and are engaged in conversation with those who have died. In this workshop led by poet Luke Fischer and musician Jean-Bernard Marie we will explore the cathartic power of poetry and music.
“One way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable..” Judith Butler
From different philosophical traditions and ancestral heritages, Peter Banki and Dalia Nassar come together to consider how philosophical inquiry may give us some orientation with regard to what “we” as a collective are today experiencing. Of course, what “we” are today experiencing is unlikely to be for each of “us” the same. However, one of the enduring virtues of philosophical inquiry is that it invites us to sit with the unreadable, without good conscience and self-certainty, with languages and truths that are often irreconcilable.
There will be readings from philosophers such as Hegel, Simone Weil, Raphael Lemkin, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Judith Butler, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and others.
Bringing local residents, schools, businesses, groups and healthcare services together, Compassionate Communities is a network to promote and support kindness, friendship and a collaborative approach to caring for one another at times of health crisis and personal loss.
Join facilitator Harp Kalsi-Smith, Board Director of Compassionate Communities Australia, for an interactive workshop on exploring compassion and building compassionate communities.
Western culture has forgotten our mourning songs. Where is the keening, the laments, the uncontrolled wails? Those deep, untameable tones that are the native language of grief? Like tears, they need to be released.