Barabara Raes founded Beyond the Spoken in 2015, a private practice where she supports people through their grieving process by creating and facilitating unique farewell rituals for them. Her main focus is on designing rituals for living loss.
Since the end of 2023, Barbara has been co-artistic director of city theatre NTGent together with Yves Degryse, where, among other things, she creates new rituals within the theatre's Care Cure Comfort Lab.
(Photo: Anneleen Van Kuyck)

Liesbet Braeckman is a textile artist and the founder of MOLLIS. Driven by her fascination with textiles, she creates personal artworks from garments and fabrics that carry a special emotional significance. With great care and respect, she gives these materials a new form, placing memory, connection, and the stories held within textiles at the heart of her work.

De Educatieve Academie is a training centre in Interactional Formgiving for professionals in mental and psycho-relational healthcare who, from a holistic view of the human being, seek to support people in their development process. Since 1989, we have offered a diverse range of training and continuing education opportunities.

Clara De Vos is a textile designer who explores how textiles can make memories, farewells, and loss tangible. Building on her master's thesis, Sometimes You Wish You Could Touch Memories, she delves into different forms of loss, from the death of a loved one to moving house, childlessness, amputation, or job loss.
She explores how textiles can create space for memory, meaning, and grief.

Najomi Smets is a cook, herbalist and teacher who explores how food and sensory experiences can create space for stories, rituals and grief. Inspired by her fascination with death, mushrooms and rituals, she creates experiences in which cooking and sharing a meal become ways to pause, share and connect.

Digesting Death is a collective formed by theatre maker and performer Laila Claessen and chef and culinary writer Finn Thomas Gorringe. Drawing on their different backgrounds, they create sensory performances where theatre and gastronomy meet.
In Digesting Death, they explore how different cultures use food and rituals to relate to death and grief. There's no better way to prove you're alive than by eating.

Wout Demeulenare is a podcast maker and the driving force behind Radio Coco. With a passion for stories and conversations, he creates space for unique voices and personal stories to be heard.