All Souls’ Day St Thomas is an inter-cultural festival focusing on celebrating our ancestors while offering meaningful opportunities to talk about grief and reflect on our own mortality. Inspired by two of the festival's co-founders, Aga Wanwoicz and Irene Xochit Urrutia, who bonded over their shared experience and passion drawn from their home countries, Poland and Mexico, where ancestor worship and remembrance are a communal family celebration. The festival is a call from their homelands to use creativity within the community to reconnect with a part of their heritage here. In doing so they offer a rich and valuable experience for other people living in Exeter to reconnect to their local area with renewed perspective and investment. The festival is also a space to invite additional immigrant communities to share their traditions, rituals, faiths and creativity, building an inter-cultural festival full of new connection points, for new bonds to be made across cultural divides.

The day-long event will include creative workshops run by local artists and practitioners, discussions, talks, and performances. Fostering an intergenerational and intercultural experience through the shared theme of grief, the festival aims to strengthen bonds and expand the creative identity of our quickly diversifying city to include those from global majority, immigrant, refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds. By being creative together, sharing food and traditions, we can foster better conversations, not just about grief and death but about our shared humanity in general.

The festival will take place on 27 October, 9.30am-4pm, at the Apostle Church on Cowick Street – a historic building with an existing deep significance within the St Thomas community. By layering a new story of how this space can be used by a wide demographic of the Exeter population, we can build a new shared meaning, one that speaks to the inclusive and welcoming nature of the city and its institutions that are cultivating meaningful and long-lasting inclusive practices.