Queer Death Cafe with Hini Hanara and Victoria Spence

The English term “queer” is etymologically related to the German “quer”, which means at a slant, tilted, off-centre or diagonal. While most often used today to describe non-normative sexual and gender identities, queer may also help us to think otherwise about death and dying and their consequences for how we live our lives.

Regardless of how we might identify as sexual or gendered beings, can death and dying themselves be thought of as queer experiences, as giving us the opportunity to open ourselves to a kind of queer thinking? How do they invite us to question the mainstream of everyday life and compel us to think otherwise about who we are, where we come from and what we think is important? How can a queer approach to death and dying help us to undo the hold of capitalism and racism on our societies and help us to become more inclusive, less judgemental and community-minded?

Join Hini Hanara and Victoria Spence for a fascinating discussion of the intersections between queerness, death and dying and de-colonisation.

Water Vessel: Objects of Memory and Ritual with Iqbal Barkat

This interactive workshop explores how objects serve as vessels for memory, ritual, and the liminal space between life and death.

Through the screening of Water Vessel, we contemplate the carafe's sacred function in Islamic washing rituals (ghusl al-mayyit), where rose water and perfumes transform ablution into an act of spiritual purification and dignity. These aromatic substances—alongside their ornate vessels—carry deep theological significance across Shia and Sunni traditions, whilst also resonating with Jewish tahara practices where similar acts of honour are bestowed upon the deceased.

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.

Iqbal Barkat wrote his PhD on novelty in cinema, tracing the history through from the work of Dziga Vertov, a pioneering film-maker in the early Soviet Union.

As part of his research he has produced the independent feature film Mortars, which seeks to explore what Robert Koehler calls the 'cinema of in-between-ness' - refusing categories of fiction or non-fiction. It follows the life of a woman whose house was destroyed by demolition exercises carried out by the Australian Defence Force. She has lived in a broken house for over fifty years and is still seeking reparations.

His research interests include Independent Cinema; Early Soviet Cinema; Dance; Community Filmmaking; The Cinematic Practice of Dziga Vertov; The Philosophy of Alain Badiou.

Iqbal is also Co President of the Muslim Collective, an Australian faith-based community for progressive thought and social action.

The Five Remembrances with Peter Banki

The Five Remembrances are a Buddhist practice of meditating on the universal truths of aging, illness, death, separation from loved ones, and the consequences of one's actions. Reciting these can foster appreciation for life, encourage living more fully, and provide a framework for facing loss and death with greater equanimity and peace. 

The Five Remembrances

Anguttara Nikaya 5.57

Translation by Thich Nhat Hanh

1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

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.

Purpose of the Practice

• Promote appreciation for life:

  By facing impermanence, individuals can savor their lives and relationships more deeply. 

• Cultivate resilience:

  The practice helps build strength and adaptability when facing difficult circumstances. 

• Prepare for loss and death:

  Contemplating these truths can reduce fear and anxiety surrounding one's own death and provide support for others facing loss. 

• Foster compassion:

  Understanding shared suffering fosters a sense of interconnectedness with others. 

A Body of 48 with Taka Takigushi

Eighty years later I find myself in Bangkok making work to reckon with my grandmother. Her life — and therefore mine — was shaped by wartime violence: her first husband, a police officer, died because of the war, and that loss cast a long shadow across generations.

No more Hiroshima

No more Nagasaki

No more wars

This project tells the story of my grandmother, a 26-year-old woman from the countryside who had little awareness of the wider world she was living in. Her despair, felt even forty years after his death, made me confront the particular way war damages civilians and the quiet, lasting cost of that damage. Her life — and therefore mine — was shaped by wartime violence: her first husband, a police officer, died because of the war, and that loss cast a long shadow across generations.

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. The work is an act of witnessing: tender, unsettled, and insistently present.

I would like to pay my condolences to and commemorate all deceased spirits of the wars, conflicts and genocides past and present.

My late grandmother wrote a journal about loss of her first husband by atomic bomb on 15th August 1945.

She left me many memories and I wished to explore how culture, hometown, history and memory are accumulated in one’s body.

Through media images and movement, the work both challenges and interprets the invisible yet profound impact of one’s cultural and historical identity created over generations.

In 2025, my 48 years old body is here right now.
In 1977, I was born and
In 1971, my mother married my father when she was 23.
In 1948, my grandmother remarried and my mother was born.
In 1945, my grandmother was 26 years old and her first husband was 33 when he passed away.

If he didn't get killed by the bomb, my grandmother didn't remarry
my mother was not born.
and I am not here, in front of you right now.

My body is not here in front of you.

80 years after that day
this dream-like history is unlike a dream.

(A poem added to the performance written by Taka Takiguchi)

Taka Takiguchi (滝口貴) is a Naarm/Melbourne-based independent artist and producer of Japanese (Hiroshima) heritage.

His practice delves into personal stories, places, their historical contexts, and our presence within them today. He explores relational phenomena—between memory, time, and language—bringing them to life through poetry, scriptwriting, and movement-based techniques including the Suzuki Method, Butoh, and shamanic/trance dance.

The recent projects include: "Lost in Place" - Performer at Mona Foma (2022) & Mona Museum (2023) | "Obang – Theatre for babies" Producer & Performer at Sydney Opera House (2024), Bunjil Place (2023) & Bowery Theatre (2023) | "Humans in between" - Director & Performer at Pavilion Melbourne (2023) | “Apologia” - Performer at Malthouse (2024) | "Kiki and Zuki" -Shadow puppet theatre for kids (2025) .

Kopi Healing: Building an Understanding of Grief from an Indigenous Cultural Perspective with Maree Clarke, Kerri Clarke and Nicholas Hovington

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.

In this workshop internationally renowned artist, Maree Clarke, will speak about mourning practices of South Eastern Australia. In particular, she will focus on the practice of wearing Kopi mourning caps.

Participants will first listen to a talk and then be guided through a process of experiencing clay headwear (Kopi) to support a deepened understanding of Aboriginal culture and the connections between arts and emotional well-being. The workshop will address ‘Sorry Business’, with the greatest respect.

The Kopi mourning cap represents loss, sorrow and grief. Aboriginal women would cut off their hair, weave a net of emu sinew and place the sinew on their head. They’d then cover it with several layers of gypsum, a white river clay, forming the Kopi. These Kopi could weigh up to 7kg and were a signifier of the wearer being in a state of grief. There is documentation of men also wearing the Kopi mourning cap. Women wore the Kopi from two weeks to six months depending on their relationship to the deceased. At the end of their mourning period the Kopi was taken off and placed on the grave of their deceased loved one.

In this workshop the wearing of the Kopi will be done with respect and reverence for the revitalisation of this mourning practice, within a contemporary context. Men and women are encouraged to attend.

Changing Modes of Body Deposition: Shrouded Cremation and Human Composting with Victoria Spence, Jude Warren and Tui Davidson

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?

Come and sign NSW petition asking for Human Composting to become a regenerative and sustainable death care choice! So you can have a choice to become rich soil when you die! Eco Rest - Natural Death Matters

This workshop will be led by Victoria Spence, Tui Davidson and Jude Warren. They are each seeking strategies of social change in the funeral industry.

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. Through the consideration of scenarios, groups will be asked to work out how we can show up for each other in home funeral in a variety of ways. This will require active participation through group work, brainstorming, and generous sharing of the collective wisdom we all hold. The aim is that you walk away with a sense of empowerment and the knowledge that it may just be achievable.

Worn Grief: Interlaced Approaches to Wearing Your Loss with Pia Interlandi, Maree Clarke, Kerri Clarke & Hini Hanara

Following on from their 2024 ‘Interlacing of Garments for the Grave and Cloak Making’ Maree Clarke and Pia Interlandi are back with their collaborators Kerrie Clarke and Hini Hanara to bring a second interlacing to the Death Fest.

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.

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

Intersecting fashion and funerals, Dr Pia Interlandi explores materials and materiality in relation to dress, death, and decomposition. Through her creative practice research, Garments for the Grave, she designs rituals for facilitating dressing, and addressing the dead body. This practice encourages audiences to consider what they will wear in death, initiating their own end-of-life plan. Pia also works with the dying to co-design a final garment and then supports their families to dress their body in personalised ritual for the funeral.

Harnessing a toolkit of skills that combine tacit and explicit knowledge bases, Pia intermeshes scholarly and professional practice, interlacing personal reflection, community engagement, and the rigor(mortis) of academia.

Dr Pia Interlandi has recently relocated to Perth, Western Australia to undertake a new academic appointment as Associate Professor of Creative Practice in the School of Design and the Built Environment at Curtin University.

My art is about regenerating cultural practises, making people aware of, you know, our culture, and that we are a really strong culture, and that we haven't lost anything; I think they've just been, some of these practises have been laying dormant for a while.”

— MAREE CLAKE

Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were lost – or laying dormant – over the period of colonisation, as well as a leader in nurturing and promoting the diversity of contemporary southeast Aboriginal artists.

Maree’s continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage has seen her revification of the traditional possum skin cloaks, together with the production of contemporary designs of kangaroo teeth necklaces, river reed necklaces and string headbands adorned with kangaroo teeth and echidna quills, in both traditional and contemporary materials such as glass and 3D printing.

Maree Clarke’s multi media installations of photography including lenticular prints, 3D photographs and photographic holograms as well as painting, sculpture and video installation further explore the customary ceremonies, rituals and language of her ancestors and reveal her long held ambitions to facilitate cross-cultural dialogue about the ongoing effects of colonisation, while simultaneously providing space for the Aboriginal community to engage with and ‘mourn’ the impact of dispossession and loss.

Maree is known for her open and collaborative approach to cultural practice. She consistently works in intergenerational collaboration to revive dormant cultural knowledge – and uses technology to bring new audiences to contemporary southeast Aboriginal arts.

Maree Clarke has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and in 2021 she was the subject of a major survey exhibition Maree Clarke – Ancestral Memories at the National Gallery of Victoria. Other recent exhibitions includeTarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2021), The National, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2021), Reversible Destiny, Tokyo Photographic Museum, Tokyo Japan (2021) and the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary Art Prize, for which she was awarded the Victorian Artist award. In 2020 she was awarded the Linewide Commission for the Metro Tunnel project (current) and is the recipient of the 2020 Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fellowship.

-KERRI CLARKE

Kerri Clarke is an artist of Boon Wurrung descent in south-eastern Australia. Kerri is skilled in a variety of methods, including sewing and working with animal skins. Like her aunt, Maree Clarke, Kerri is active in the resurgence of traditional Aboriginal Australian artistic methods. She is also a counsellor who works with families in New South Wales.

-HINI HERARA

Hini (Ngati Kahungunu) is a self-described ‘Decolonising Death Daddy.’ They’re a social change artist and fashion designer. Founder of ‘Queer as Death Collective’ and creator of ‘Corpse Couture’ death literacy experience.  

Hini's cultural practices of Tangihanga guide their desire to see more community-led death care.

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 Ceremony with Performances (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. 

Metamorphosis | A Ritual of Grief and Eros with Alessandra Massi

An immersive journey into the mystery of life’s threshold — exploring the sacred transition of our final exhalation and first inhalation. Together, through imaginative and somatic exploration, we will reflect on the moment of leaving and re-entering the ‘earthen vessel.’

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.

Breathe, move, feel, and vocalize to make space for this energy so we can choose to direct it in powerful loving ways. Both eros and grief open the flow of energy in our hearts and entire beings.

If you want to control a society, teach them to be ashamed of who they are and what they deeply desire. They will lose a sense of what's possible. Many people have lived and died in a restricted sense of what is possible and have passed that along through generations. This ritual invites you to tremble open to see a future beyond these restrictions, a future we can be proud of together.

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 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.

Philosophical Responses to War and Genocide with Dalia Nassar and Peter Banki

Many people in the world experience death and dying today without funeral rites, hospitals, nursing homes, palliative care, professional and personal support or even a roof above their head. They are murdered, starved, left to die, at the mercy of decisions they have little or no control over. Through the news cycle and social media, the rest of “us” are bombarded daily with images and stories of war and genocide that distress us, that arguably even traumatise us collectively.

“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.

Compassionate Communities: a Panel Discussion led by Harpreet Kalsi

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. Together with a panel of inspiring leaders driving compassionate communities work, this session will open space for reflection and dialogue on what it means to practice compassion—beginning with ourselves, extending to our inner circles, and reaching out to the wider community. We will explore how compassion can be lived and practiced during all facets of life, better preparing us to mobilise in our daily lives and communities to support one another through serious illness, death, and bereavement. Participants will be invited into conversation and collective practice, creating momentum for a movement that nurtures care, connection, and compassion at every level of community life.

We will consider:

• What's going well and what needs to be changed?

• What are compassionate communities doing? What more can be done?

• What are the intersects between compassionate communities and the health system

• How can home based palliative care be accessed?

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.

In this workshop we will form a temporary village of grieving voices. No singing experience is necessary. Just some courage. Using exercises of breath and sound and communal support, I will invite you to get curious about where grief lives in your body. Holding and attending to these hurts with your own sound. We will seek as yet unsung demons of grief and make an exit wound of our throats.

Grief can feel isolating. But it also holds powerful connective potential. Together we will compassionately share and bear witness to folks singing, crying, wailing or whispering their many losses. Creating a communal song that will live on outside our individual selves, a bridge between what’s here and what’s next.