Our 2025 Program

Featured

Holding Our Own: Home Funerals and Collective Wisdom with Bec Lyons

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.

Interlacing Cloak Making and Garments for the Grave with Pia Interlandi Maree Clarke and Kerri Clarke

Join Maree Clarke, a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, her niece, Boon Wurrung artist Kerri Clarke, and acclaimed fashion designer, Pia Interlandi, as they bring together their practices for the first time.

The Village (Saturday evening)

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.

Closing Grief Ceremony with Boats (Sunday Evening)

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.

Shedding: A Ritual of Grief and Eros with Alessandra Massi

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.

Poetry and Music as Catharsis with Luke Fischer and Jean Bernard Marie

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.

Modern Philosophical Approaches to Death and Dying with Dalia Nassar and Peter Banki

Death and dying are multi-faceted and deeply ambivalent experiences. There is not one true way of thinking about and understanding them. Come learn about the diverse and often irreconcilable perspectives of philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida on death and dying.

Compassionate Communities: a Panel Discussion led by Harpreet Kalsi

Compassionate communities are a core part of public health approaches to palliative care, end of life care and bereavement. The term was coined by Allan Kellehear in the mid-2000s to describe communities which play a much stronger role in the care of people at end of life and their families and carers through illness, dying, death and bereavement.

Singing Out Our Losses with Jess Aszodi

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.

Download the 2024 Schedule