Participate, Co-create & Advocate for the Voices of Human and More-Than-Human Elders
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This hands-on workshop demonstrates the potential of arts and design for social change and advocacy. Guided by interactive and social designers, participants get hands-on experience translating texts about climate change (e.g. UN Secretary General remarks on Climate Change) and testimonies of marginalized older adults and their families (the Royal Commission into Aged Care) into emotive and engaging found poems, integrated with visuals to become a collaborative digital art installation. The event – at the intersection of social and environmental justice, design, and art – aims to galvanise an audience to engage with the neglected, silenced voices of our elders – both human and more-than-human going unheard.
The marginalisation is shared: a 2020 Australian Royal Commission into Aging and Aged Care found shocking incidences of neglect and abuse in the Australian aged care system – but public engagement and response was limited and the concerns remain unheard (Pagone & Briggs, 2021). This neglect is mirrored in the disregard faced by our planet’s elders and guardians of the Earth, and a parallel emerges between the oldest generation of people and the Earth’s oldest landscapes, ecosystems, and species, going unheard and unappreciated.
Solastalgia can assist in understanding this parallel. Solastalgia describes the emotional response to witnessing adverse environmental changes, often caused by human activities like landscape destruction, mass extinction, and climate change (Albrecht, 2005). It underscores the deep connection between individuals and their environment, impacting their mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. Remarkably, the emotions associated with Solastalgia mirror the experiences of older adults in care facilities, encompassing feelings of disorientation, disconnection, displacement. This workshop emphasizes the shared values of human ancestral roots and draws attention to the often-overlooked voices of older individuals, urging society to protect, respect, care for, and promote the well-being of elders, both human and more-than-human.
The event has 3 parts, comprising (1)a 1.5 hour facilitated poetry workshop, guiding participants through the process of creating found/erasure poems and original lyric poems about the invisibility and urgency of engaging with elders of earths ecosystem; followed by (2)another 1.5 hour facilitated interactive visual design workshop, guiding participants on subsequent visual interpretations of poetry snippets through collages from media images and text strings for machine language algorithms to generate imagery. In the last half, text and image are published (live) into (3)a collaborative interactive artistic visualisation installed in the workshop space.
The event leverages design and arts-based methods, data visualisation and interaction design to help make often unheard concerns, heard. By directly engaging audiences with testimonials and speeches to create poems and visuals, then sharing these in interactive artistic data visualisations that audiences interact with, they gain a physically experience of the issues. This embodied experience of the stories reduces the psychological distance to the subjects, helping to overcome the taboos associated with aged care and dying, environmental anxiety and climate, giving voice to the marginalized.
