Abstract

This article generates new understandings of dementia through feminist posthumanist and performative engagements with co-creative artmaking practices during a six-month study in a residential care home in Norway. Dementia emerges within multisensorial entanglements of more-than-human materials in three different artmaking sessions, which first materialized in the form of collective photographs and vignettes and culminated in a final exhibition, Gleaming Moments, in the care home. Drawing on these photographs, vignettes, and the author's engagement as a research artist in the sessions, this analysis examined how dementia was enacted as a spark of inspiration, felted warm seat pads, and a friendly more-than-human touch, that is, a touch of human and nonhuman art materials. These findings suggest new ontologies of dementia within multisensorial artmaking practices, in which dementia functions as a material for co-creative artmaking rather than a disease. These findings disrupt dominant biomedical ontologies of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, as well as humanist person-centered practices in dementia care, which have concretized an individual, rather than relational, focus on dementia. In contrast, this study explores dementia as a phenomenon within the entanglements of human and nonhuman intra-active agencies. By highlighting the significance of these agencies (i.e., sponge holder-painting, wool-felting, choir-singing, chick-making) for different worlds-making with dementia, this study provides an entry point for imagining feminist posthumanist caring. Thus, dementia becomes a matter in life that is not to be managed and defeated to achieve successful aging, but to be interrogated and embraced.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call