What a Portuguese Tile Painting Workshop Taught Us About Grief

This time we went to Gazete Azulejos, a small tile studio on Rua Duque de Palmela that grew out of a bigger project called Os Azulejos do Porto. Our first trip's tile workshop, back in 2024, was at a different studio, but the instinct behind choosing either one has stayed the same: find somewhere that treats a tile as something worth real effort, not something to mass produce.

Os Azulejos do Porto started in 2016, when Alba Plaza and Marisa Ferreira set out to photograph and catalogue the historic tiled facades across the city before they disappeared. By their own count there are at least a thousand distinct tile patterns in Porto, and the heritage they document is a genuinely threatened one: construction companies redeveloping the city have been demolishing old tiled buildings, discarding pieces that are hundreds of years old and made in factories that no longer exist. Their project is self-funded, and mostly unglamorous work: photographing, researching, cataloguing, building a record of a heritage nobody was ever required to save. The tile-painting workshop grew directly out of that project, teaching visitors the original techniques rather than a simplified version of them.

We each painted two tiles, the traditional way: trace a design onto tracing paper, transfer the outline with a pricked pattern and a pounce of charcoal dust, then paint freehand or fill in with a stencil. As before, I invited each person to dedicate their colours to a memory of the one they carry, and to spend those minutes of brushwork inside that memory rather than explaining it out loud.

The tiles do not come home with you the same day. They go into the kiln after the workshop and are only ready the next day, which means the making and the keeping happen on two different days, a small pause built into the process whether you plan for it or not.

Making something real, by hand, in a place that works this hard to protect Porto's tile heritage, is exactly the kind of experience our trips are built around. None of it fixes anything. But it gives a room full of grieving strangers somewhere to put their hands and their attention for an afternoon, in a workshop that grew directly out of a project two women started in 2016 because they decided this heritage was worth the effort of saving. That is not a bad thing to sit inside while you are learning to carry a loss of your own.

Some people arranged to collect their tiles before we left Porto, others had them sent on afterward. Either way, something made slowly, on purpose, during a week built around a loss, now exists somewhere in the world. That was true of the tiles from our first trip too, made in a different studio two years earlier, and it will be true of whoever paints here next.