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?

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

One day, we will all die. When it comes to the day of your funeral, you can hope others summarise your life - or you can ensure it by creating your own video eulogy. This workshop is led by Danika Armytage, the founder of and director of Big Stories Little Films, Australia's leading Legacy Film service.

Bring Your Phone

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.

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

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

In this workshop internationally renowned artist, Maree Clarke, will speak about mourning practices of South Eastern Australia. With her husband, Nicholas Hovington and her niece Kerri Clarke, they will focus on the practice of making and wearing Kopi mourning caps.

Join festival founder Peter Banki as he discusses the Five Rememberances. 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.

Grief can feel isolating. But it also holds powerful connective potential. In this workshop we will form a temporary village of grieving voices. No singing experience is necessary. Just some courage.

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.

Led by poet Luke Fischer and musician Jean-Bernard Marie we will explore the cathartic power of poetry and music.

Join facilitator Harp Kalsi-Smith, Board Director of Compassionate Communities Australia, for an interactive workshop on exploring compassion and building compassionate communities.

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.

Join Rebecca Lyons and Emma Beattie as we 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. The aim is that you walk away with a sense of empowerment and the knowledge that it may just be achievable.

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 2025.