THE ART OF MOURNING

Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo presents The Art of Mourning, a two-day symposium and roundtable bringing together different perspectives on grief, remembrance and the material and cultural forms through which we continue our relationships with the absent.

About the Event

What remains after loss? How do objects, images, scents, places and rituals continue to hold the presence of those who are no longer here?

The Art of Mourning is a two-day interdisciplinary symposium exploring the relationship between art, memory, loss and the culture of grief.

Bringing together perspectives from art history, material culture, psychoanalysis, literature and contemporary artistic practice, the programme considers the ways human beings have sought to give physical and symbolic form to absence: through portraiture and memorial objects, mourning and sentimental jewellery, personal possessions, photography, scent, ritual, writing and artistic creation.

Particular attention is given to the intimate objects and sensory traces created, carried or preserved in response to loss. Hair, miniature portraits, jewellery, photographs, letters, inherited belongings and scent reveal a long history of attempts to keep memory physically and emotionally close, transforming private sentiment into material and cultural forms.

Rather than approaching grief solely as something belonging to the past, the symposium considers memory as an active relationship between presence and absence. It asks how historical cultures of mourning might contribute to contemporary conversations around loss and emotional wellbeing, and how art, objects, sensory experience and storytelling can offer ways of witnessing, preserving and transforming memory.

Developed within Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo’s wider research into memory and the intangible heritage of sentiments, The Art of Mourning creates a space for exchange between historical research, contemporary thought and lived experience.

Symposium & Roundtable

The programme brings together invited lectures, artistic and sensory contributions, a moderated roundtable and audience conversation, encouraging dialogue across disciplines and perspectives.

Participants include:

Dr. Andrea Fiorentini
Psychoanalyst Andrea Fiorentini will open the programme with a reflection on the psychological work of mourning: its breakdown, its denial and its possible transformation. Drawing from clinical practice, his contribution offers a framework for understanding how loss may remain unresolved, be resisted, or gradually become part of a renewed inner life through memory.

Sarah Nehama
A leading authority on mourning jewellery, Sarah Nehama will examine the extraordinary ways in which rings, lockets, brooches and miniature memorial objects have historically carried grief, devotion and remembrance. Her work reveals how jewellery can function not merely as ornament, but as an intimate architecture of memory.

Margaux Serrano
Drawing on her experience as an auctioneer, Margaux Serrano will reflect on the emotional afterlife of objects passing through estates and inheritances. Her perspective brings us close to the belongings that survive us: objects marked by use, affection, inscription and transmission, which can become enduring witnesses to a life, a relationship or a loss.

Sarah-Luna Berrué-Fahy
Currently a junior specialist in the jewellery department of the Parisian auction house Gros & Delettrez, Sarah-Luna Berrué-Fahy will join Margaux Serrano in approaching questions of memory, inheritance and emotional narrative from a literary and research-based perspective. Their contribution opens the discussion towards the stories objects carry and the fragile human presences they continue to evoke.

Jay Davani
Persian artist and founder of Project Mortem, Jay Davani will explore photography as a space of mourning, remembrance and collective reflection. Drawing from her work as a death advocate and grief facilitator, her contribution considers the image not only as documentation, but as a site where absence can be framed, held and revisited, and where grief may take visual form through memory, ritual and storytelling.

Nuri McBride
Perfumer, cultural historian and founder of Atropos Parfums, Nuri McBride will explore scent as a living trace of memory, grief and the body. Drawing from her research for the Death/Scent Project, her contribution will consider how smell mediates mourning, embodiment and the persistence of the dead within personal and cultural memory. Alongside her lecture, The Persistence of the Dead: Scent, Memory, and the Body, she will lead a Scent Walk inviting participants to engage with remembrance through an immersive sensory experience.

Allison Zurfluh
Swiss-Californian artist Allison Zurfluh will explore the relationship between memory, place, loss and the fragile ecology of the Venetian Lagoon. Drawing from a practice rooted in observation, immersion and sustained dialogue with the landscape, her contribution will consider how art can preserve threatened environments, translate absence into material form and create new ways of remembering what is at risk of disappearing.

Micah Perks
Award-winning author and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Micah Perks will explore autobiographical writing as a space for mourning, memory and transformation. Drawing from her work as a novelist and educator, her contribution invites participants to consider storytelling as a creative practice through which grief can be witnessed, shared and reimagined, offering new ways of navigating loss through language and imagination.

Please note that additional participants are yet to be confirmed.

Themes Explored

The symposium will move across interconnected questions surrounding the psychological work of mourning and its transformations; mourning jewellery and sentimental objects as carriers of grief; inheritance, estate objects and the emotional afterlife of personal belongings; photography as a medium of remembrance and collective memory; hair as relic, trace and material presence; scent and sensory memory; place, landscape and ecological loss; autobiographical writing as a practice of remembrance; and ritual, symbolism and cultural forms of mourning.

Through lectures, conversations, sensory encounters and moments of exchange, The Art of Mourning invites the public into a rare and layered dialogue on the forms through which we continue to live with absence.

Event Information

Dates: Thursday, 12 & Friday, 13 November 2026
Time: 15:00–18:30
Location: Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo, Palazzo Valier, San Polo 1022, Venice
Capacity: Limited
Booking: Reservation required
Attendance: Tickets may be reserved for either individual day or for both days. The full programme and schedule will be announced shortly.

Admission: €40 per day or €80 for both days

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