Co-creative Affordance: Rethinking “Beyond Loss” in Dementia through Co-dwelling

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on a decade of voluntary work and a year of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in an orthodox Jewish care home in London, I demonstrate the ways in which an individual’s loss of cognition, language and memory is challenged, rethought and facilitated in everyday life. Drawing on Ingold’s idea of dwelling, I examine how loss is constantly negotiated and distributed in ways of becoming that are radically contingent, profoundly relational and potentially generative during an art activity in the context of co-dwelling. I refer to this as dementia-becoming. I suggest a more inclusive understanding of loss as a way of life, constitutive of life, and appreciated as a potential co-creative affordance.