Foundation Art and Public Space
artist: Lino Hellings, Yvonne Dröge Wendel
located in: Verpleeghuis de Bieslandhof,
In her book Ik heb Alzheimer (I Have Alzheimer’s), Stella Braam writes about her father who is growing demented. The book is the outcome of Braam’s own quest to find out ways to keep in contact with her father. Alzheimer’s surreptitiously interferes with our memory, thinking, perception and actions and it seems as if the sufferer ‘exists less and less’. Together with her father, Braam developed a ‘crash course in Alzheimer’s Communication’, which focused on the use of simple sentences that clearly describe situations in order to keep communicating with demented patients.
Handling demented patients requires a high degree of empathy and, although a lot of attention is being paid to appropriate treatments in Dutch nursing homes, there is less time to support patients and give them personal attention. This is a complex issue that cannot be solved through art. However an art project can offer a positive contribution albeit only by exploring unconventional possibilities and solutions.
Lino Hellings
,
Yvonne Dröge Wendel
Bieslandhof
The healthcare sector forms an important sphere of activity for SKOR and years of experience have shown that there are many more possibilities for placing art in geriatric nursing homes. The Bieslandhof, a nursing home located in Delft, is open to a different research-based method. By treading unfamiliar territory and by not approaching old age and Alzheimer’s as diseases or problems but, rather, as phases of life that require a specific environment and design, alternatives are offered that could lead to improved living circumstances and other treatment methods.
SKOR acted as an advisor to the Bieslandhof art project, which was a collaboration between artists Lino Hellings and Yvonne Dröge Wendel, both of whom use research-based work methods. In her work Dröge Wendel focuses on the relationship between people and objects, whereas Hellings observes the cohesion between the ‘thing’ and its ‘space’ from an objective angle while searching for one detail that could lead to a visual intervention. For the Bieslandhof they sought a way in which to connect with the residents. By departing from the theory that stresses what a demented patient cannot do, they tried to discover how the patients could be reached. They developed three workshops with felt during which they studied the needs, preferences, qualities and capacities of the Bieslandhof’s residents. During three days last April these felt workshops were given to residents in three different wards. The aim wasn’t to achieve or produce but, rather, to gain knowledge of and participate in the daily routine of a nursing home.
With these workshops the artists have been creatively ‘charged’ and will now enter the next phase, i.e. the design, which will carry the guiding principle: ‘If art is an emotional prosthesis, what is the lack?’. This question is not easy to answer. For example: is the continual redefining of identity a lack? In their sequel, they will ask a Neuro Linguistic Programming therapist how memory and, by extension, the experience of demented patients, can be influenced. This project, which is in collaboration with SKOR, will eventually lead to a work. Accounts of the workshops and the further development of the design process can be read on the public website: www.bies.nu.
