ABSTRACT
In the project “Beyond Autonomy and Language: Towards a Disability Studies Perspective on Dementia,” we collaborated as researchers with the Limburgs museum to find ways to include people who live with dementia by means of the arts. Instead of focusing on reminiscence, we advocated appealing to people’s imagination. In collaboration with filmmaker Joël Rabijns, we developed three films with archive material from the museum. We did ethnographic research in three psychogeriatric wards to study how people engaged with the film screenings. Findings show how the film-set provided a stable material setting and subjective forum for participants to appear as a person, e.g., by creating conditions that appealed to sensory and emotional capacities of the viewers and supported their embodied being in a process of playful interaction.
