Project title
Description of initiative
A pilot cultural project that integrates culture into the care and life practices of dependent elderly people (Alzheimer's patients in particular), enabling them to live better in the establishment thanks to adapted artistic activities. By requiring a physical effort and/or by soliciting the individual's capacity for imagination and reflection, artistic practices can help in a multi-dimensional care leading to positive changes at different levels: internal to the patient (aesthetic enjoyment of the individual creator and/or receiver, psychic reorganisations linked to creative expression, etc.); external to the patient in his or her relationship with others and therefore, for example, with carers and attendants (new capacities for expression, communicative reorganisations, etc.); symbolic (transformations in subjective and collective representations of the self, the other, a place, etc.). The objective of the project is to scientifically analyze the role that artistic and cultural practices can play on the state of health of dependent elderly people in order to modify the way they are cared, both at home and in care facilities. In order to achieve this objective, the project proposes to observe and analyze the practices already put in place within the framework of the Gerontology department in order to evaluate and improve them and, subsequently, legitimate them as a means of caring for frail or dependent elderly people.
Further information on the initiative
Themes: Culture and...
Keywords
Target group
Cultural field
Timeframe
Sources of funding
Results, benefits, impact and lessons learnt
The project is studying the different artistic practices offered to older people who have been identified as vulnerable by “L’Hôpital de Jour des Fragilités et de la Prévention de la Dépendance de la Grave” in Toulouse. The day hospital encourages patients to join some art workshops facilitated by professional artists and by cultural institutions recognized both locally and nationally. These artistic practices that do not fall under art therapy and do not have any therapeutic goals fit into a new way of thinking those interventions.
This study focuses on the experience of participants, on the educational positioning of the artists and also on the required dimensions that make those devices a success. To achieve this, they have established an organized research protocol consisted of several stages (observation, analysis, experimentation, modelling.), based on almost four years. This research, driven by l’École de Toulouse, is at the intersection of several disciplines and it aims to capture the different levels of reality, particularly through case studies. The study, firmly focused on the co-creation of the knowledge between the artists and the researcher, participates in the understanding of the approach to artistic practices and aims to demonstrate the interest of professional artistic intervention in the field of health and also to reflect the role that art can play for every individual in a society, regardless of their profile.