What a Portuguese Tile Painting Workshop Taught Us About Grief

We went back to Boiler Studio this August, the same tile painting workshop from our very first Grief Trip in 2024. Daniela remembered exactly why we come. I wrote last time about what it costs to keep a tradition like azulejos alive, and about giving each person a colour to dedicate to a memory of the one they carry. This time round the workshop itself was the same. What was different was doing it with a second group who had never met the first.

There is something specific about running the exact same workshop twice, two years apart, with two rooms full of people who will never know each other. The tiles themselves do not care. The same paint pots, more or less, the same shelf of finished panels on the wall behind the table. But the memories being dedicated in that room this time belonged to entirely different people, entirely different losses, and the tile absorbed them exactly the way it absorbed ours in 2024. That continuity is its own kind of comfort, even if none of this year's group will ever meet last time's.

By the end of it, our second group had their own row of tiles drying on the table, next to panels of Porto's old azulejos on the studio wall, centuries apart and doing the same job as both years of ours: keeping something, on purpose, because someone decided it mattered enough to bother.

Most people took theirs home this year, the way the first group did. A few left them behind for the studio, added to a shelf that is now two Grief Trips deep in tiles from strangers who came here carrying loss and left with something small and glazed and finished. That shelf is its own kind of azulejo now. Proof, tile by tile, of how many of us choose to keep going anyway.