An Artistic Exploration of Ageing - Session 6
Welcome to our sixth in these experimental online events to spark artistic responses to the experience of ageing, past, present, future, inside and outside of us and of others.
This week we will not be offering a provokation but an invitation to reflect together on how our first 5 sessions have got us thinking and got us creating.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE ANYTHING YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING ON OR TO TALK OVER A PARTICULAR IDEA YOU ARE DEVELOPING THEN THERE WILL BE PLENTY OF TIME TO DO SO IN THIS SESSION. SO GET YOUR CREATIVE JERKS GOING! also if you are not feeling creative but want to look at others who are you're very welcome too.
As with all the sessions they are open to those who have joined before and those who are new. If you are new you can access the introductions to each of the five sessions below (they go from top to bottom in terms of order).
The basic format is this:
there will be a bit of chat to get us started, some kind of provocation to get the juices going and then a short time to air and chew it over with each other. This week we will also be sharing any completed artworks (but no problem if you don't have any).
Below is the description of this project we already circulated for session one which explains more fully what it is about.
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We want to tell new stories about age and identity; the ones we actually live and the ones we long to live.
Our dominant story of ageing is a negative one.
It goes something like this; being young is good but as you enter the second half of life you go into decline becoming more ugly and less able mentally and physically and that is bad, and then comes death.
Children as young as 4 hold negative attitudes towards being old despite the opposite evidence that happiness is on an upward trajectory in our 60s, 70s and 80s. It's a story which many are critiquing, especially with the ageism towards and marginalisation of older people highlighted during the coronavirus pandemic. It's good to critique, but it is essential to imagine.
So what are the other stories of ageing waiting to be imagined?
Not about being old, but about being any age and every age?
And how do we make these new stories visible, hearable, feelable and sharable?
We think art is one way. Big art, small art, blue tack modelling art; expressions of the experience of inhabiting an age identity, whether that is old, young or something in between, but the real one not the stereotyped one.
SO we are holding informal creative online meetings to see what we can dream up.(recordings of intro parts of past sessions available below)
Each session will start with a provocation from us to help think creatively about age identity across the life course. This will be followed by an opportunity to individually nurture some embryonic ideas of creations to explore the provocation (in whatever medium is right to you, performance, visual art, sound, written, sculpture etc).
Then if you wish, there will be a chance to share these first ideas with other creators on the call for feedback and development. We will have the remainder of the week to develop either the ideas we have during the session or new and better ones we have whilst sitting on the loo afterwards.
These artworks will be shared amongst us and worldwide via instagram and/or twitter using #I_am_ageing
Our hope is to start building a body of work which artistically explores the experience of ageing across the life course. Putting sensory or narrative expression to the inner experience makes it tangible, it starts the new story. This is a first step in speaking to both a public, and an arts and culture sector which is barely able to see age as anything other than a means of bucketing people up to ensure inclusion (but not to ensure exploration and expression).
