http://www.amazon.co.uk/Room-Dementia-Broken-Pieces-Ewelina-Labuda/dp/1504941977/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432222137&sr=1-2&keywords=room+of+dementia8&qid=1432222137&sr=1-2&keywords=room+of+dementia
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Since 2007 I have been working as a Care Assistant in a care home for people with dementia. A few years ago my grandmother Eugenia died with this disease, but she died at home with her loving family around her in her own old bed. My project which I call “DEMENTIA ROOM-Broken Pieces” is about loneliness and being lost in a place without any way out, about struggling with losing the memories and knowledge that we have during our whole life. It’s about anger, madness, sadness, and beautiful old people who are no longer happy through being trapped in unfamiliar place with people who are strangers to them. Even we as family and friends sometimes do not recognize them as those we have love in the past. They are still worthy of our love and our being with in this difficult time of losing themselves. I hope I manage to picture this through my work.
At first I used a book, a novel written by Ernest Hemingway and I think known to all, ‘The Old Man and the Sea’.
I broke its form by cutting each page into small pieces and transforming them into a new text and form. Every single word from the story is used to write a different one. Every single page is a collage based mostly on my chemigrams, pictures or paintings. To produce that book I am using both digital and analogue photography, instant photography, collage, assemblage, sound , video, poetry and finally a 3D installation . Every single page will be framed with lace as a connection to our grandparent’s generation. Every poem is my interpretation of my resident’s feelings, thoughts, concerns, complaints, hopes and dreams, through theirs and my voice, and the voice of this killing disease.
The old man and the boy from Hemingway’s novel become one, the fish is love, the sea is a care home, their room, their bed, their life in ‘NOW’. ‘NOW’ is a small circle stage with a chair on it as their ship to death with a never open door to life which they will never experience again.
For those with dementia everything from the now is hard to read and understand, a metaphor or just the incomprehensible words of a broken mind. A descent into madness and imaginary worlds, it is my song of love and anger.
Our parents look after us when we are children but when they become children again are we not able to look after them? Some day we will become old and may depend on others.
