Pien Bruins Slot

Moving into elderly housing means becoming part of a system of care while finding a sense of home. This project explores the domestic lives of my grandmother and three other women, living in identical apartments within an anonymous institution. Through close engagement with these women, I found that home is continuously reactivated through embodied memory practices. Objects are no longer primarily functional. Instead, they form a scenography that preserves fragments of former lives within a standardized container.

These containers are embedded within a broader system in which care, efficiency, and expectations of social connection intersect. Although independently living elderly often resist being defined through care, they remain inseparable from it. Many residents spend most of their time inside their apartments, spaces that are both places of comfort and places of isolation.

The kitchen-table scenography invites independently living elderly and their companions, intended for everyone involved in an around elderly housing. The project functions as a travelling activity that visits these spaces. Within an intimate setting, memories and personal conversations can be shared. In doing so, the project positions interior space not only as something to inhabit, but also as a method: a means through which memories can be activated, experiences articulated, and conversations made possible.