for a walk with: dementia in the city

Publication

Serpentine Galleries, The Edgware Road Project, London, UK 2016

This publication derives from the For a Walk With… project I have initiated in 2013 in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, and the Carlton Dene and Westmead Elderly Resource Centres in London.

For a Walk With… is an invitation for the elderly care home residents experiencing dementia and for the care workers to go for a walk. Departing from the act of walking and unfolding in the framework of residential care and city planning, the project explores issues surrounding dementia, the politics of care, redevelopment, city and memory. Developed as a multi-year artist residency between 2013 and 2016 the publication expands on the collective experiences of walking as a useful research methodology and a collaborative response to the site-specific problems in the everyday.

Pointing towards a positive acknowledgement of dementia in its alternative understanding of time, space and identity, walking takes role of a dynamic research practice allowing to critically contest current understandings of redevelopment, city and residential care. While acknowledging paradigmatic notion of redevelopment as a state of urban amnesia, the project points towards dementia as a more appropriate way of reading and navigating the city in its development and planing.

For a Walk With: Dementia in the City emphasises enormous potential of dementia in providing a useful methodology to address diversity of states and processes, such as living and ageing in a city, from which we might not be able to walk away so easily.

Further links and references:

Publication Download:

The Edgware Road Project
Publication Design:
Sophie Demay, Annelous Konijnenberg
Cover design and print:
Hato
Possible Studies Editors: Amal Khalaf, Janna Graham and Ben Messih. Copy editing by: Camille Barbagallo. Author: Anton Kats