Your Will - What Do You Really Want To Say with Donal Griffin (2:30-4pm)
How do you write a Will that reflects your own wishes and values? Legacy lawyer, Donal Griffin, will share with you what people have done well and not so well in terms of their Wills.
In this workshop you will learn how to write a Will that reflects your own wishes and values. Donal Griffin will share with you what people have done well and not so well in terms of their Wills. Personal relationships often pay the price in a world where the property market means a lot. Too often, dry lawyers give people documents that are either too complex or too simple to look after a client’s family. This workshop will enable you to have the Will you deserve. In addition Donal will also share a little about the book he is writing for his son: The Irish Book of Living and Dying.
Donal Griffin is admitted as a lawyer in New South Wales and in Ireland. He also has qualifications in financial planning including the award of Certified Financial Planner. Donal has a Masters in Wills and Estates.
Donal practices as a lawyer in the areas of asset protection, estate planning, estate litigation, family trusts and business succession planning.
He specialises in advising on superannuation and family trust issues. He has a particular interest in the international aspects of estate planning which affect a large number of people in Australia.
Donal’s Sydney based firm, LEGACY LAW, is a specialist private client law firm for people who want experts to advise them in important personal areas such as wealth preservation, beneficiary protection and, for those who do not spend it all, successful inter-generational wealth transfer.
Donal takes his own advice sometimes and has a Will but more interestingly is writing a more personal document for his young son called “The Irish Book of Living and Dying”.
Storytelling with Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, Victoria Spence & Lisa Devine(4:30-6pm)
Lets tell each other stories about our experiences with death and dying and lets listen closely and empathically.
This a shared storytelling workshop, where everyone who wishes may speak and bear witness. We are telling our stories to heal and be heard.
Your Life in Our Hands: Memento Mori Talking Circle with Liz O'Reilly and Sonja Karl (4:30-6pm)
After someone dies, amidst the grief and mourning, there is always a unique collection of objects left behind – a person’s belongings. We the living, inherit these possessions and some of them, sometimes all of them, become ours - mementos of our connection to the person no longer here.
when we hold the objects of our loved ones in our hands we possess the power to tell their story
After someone dies, amidst the grief and mourning, there is always a unique collection of objects left behind – a person’s belongings. We the living, inherit these possessions and some of them, sometimes all of them, become ours - mementos of our connection to the person no longer here.
your life in our hands is an intimate talking circle for expressing stories of our loved ones and remembering them through the showing of one of their possessions. Participants are invited to bring with them a ‘death’ or ‘memory’ object that is meaningful to them and that fits easily into their hands. Led by artists Sonja Karl and Liz O’Reilly, your life in our hands refers to the act of holding an object in our hands that evokes another’s life, as well as the level of trust we imbue the circle with.
At each workshop and only if you wish, the artists will take a photograph of the object in your hands which they will send to you as a memento of the talking circle. You also have the opportunity for this image to become part of a projected installation at the festival’s closing ceremony.
about Sonja and liz
Artists Sonja Karl and Liz O’Reilly have been investigating memento mori or as they like to call them, death objects, in their individual and collaborative art practices over the last five years. Together they have held many memento mori talking circles with people from diverse life experiences who have amazing stories to tell.
Both Sonja and Liz are current and past participants in Hidden, Rookwood Cemetery’s Sculpture Prize. Their collaborative residency Common Fate culminated in an exhibition of process and performance at Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt early in 2018.
Further research into expressions of ‘memento mori’ and ‘common fate’ will take place February 2019 when Sonja and Liz embark upon a residency and collaborative exhibition at Ignite studios through Northern Rivers Community Gallery, Ballina.
Re-Imagining Forgiveness with Peter Banki, Ph.D (4:30-6pm)
One of the most profound and intimate experiences is to be wounded and unable to forgive. The inability to forgive may not be something that is simply chosen. Something very powerful continues to say ‘no’, even if one would like to say ‘yes’, to forgive the other, believing that it will make things easier, lighter and better from now on. In certain cases even after one has said ‘yes’ and meant ‘yes’, the ‘no’ insists.
One of the most profound and intimate experiences is to be wounded and unable to forgive. The inability to forgive may not be something that is simply chosen. Something very powerful continues to say ‘no’, even if one would like to say ‘yes’, to forgive the other, believing that it will make things easier, lighter and better from now on. In certain cases even after one has said ‘yes’ and meant ‘yes’, the ‘no’ insists.
To be refused forgiveness is also profound. Something in the other remains inaccessible, unattainable. And the past that one shares with the other—or with the other in oneself—is unclosed, like an incurable wound.
I have been thinking and reading about these aporias for the last few years, particularly with relation to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. However, one can appreciate what I am talking about, without necessarily referring to the legacy of these crimes.
The impossibility to forgive—or to be forgiven—may be an elementary dimension of all our relations with others, and in particular, with the people who are most important to us. It is something that I encounter forcefully in my relationships with those I love the most.
Can there be a dance of the unforgivable? A dance of forgiveness?
Doctor Peter Banki is Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney. He holds a Ph.D from New York University. He wrote his Ph.D on the debate on forgiveness in the literature of Holocaust survivors. He has published a number of articles in peer review journals in the fields of continental philosophy and literature. He has recently spoken about his research on the Radio National Program “The Philosophers’ Zone” and has tutored and lectured in philosophy at the University of Western Sydney and also at the University of Sydney. His website is http://peterbanki.com
His book The Forgiveness To Come: the Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical came out recently with Fordham University Press (2018)
Closing Ceremony with Boats (7-8:30pm)
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.
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.
