On the roof of an apartment building in Neihu District (內湖) on a scorching afternoon, an unusual photoshoot is taking place.
An elderly man is dressed in a cartoonish, oversized, bright yellow and black costume. The props are all blown-up, life-size cutouts of crayon drawings of objects such as a water dispenser.
Dutch designer Yoni Lefevre checks the photos and references a drawing of the same scene by the man’s grandson. Clearly the costume and cutout objects are taken from the drawing. Lefevre moves the man and objects around until the results closely resemble the child’s piece.
Photo by Jimmy Chao, courtesy of Yoni Lefevre
While the recreated photo is the end product of Lefevre’s Grey Power in Taipei project, she says it’s about the entire process, carried out during her two-month residency at Taipei Artist Village.
BREAKING STEREOTYPES
Lefevre is the second resident designer this year sponsored by the Taipei City Government Department of Cultural Affairs as part of its designation as World Design Capital 2016. She will present her work and conduct a collaborative workshop at Taipei Artist Village tomorrow from 1pm to 6pm.
Grey Power was originally Lefevre’s graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She brought the same project to Taiwan to observe the cultural differences in aging between the two countries.
Lefevre’s fascination with the elderly began when she was working at a care home. She later started a photo project with the residents.
“I began to see that every person has an interesting story … they have a whole life of experience. As a young person, I think we can learn a lot from them,” she says.
Yet, she found that an aging society carries many negative stereotypes about old people: they cost a lot of money, they always need caring and they’re always sad and lonely.
Lefevre thought it wasn’t enough to just document the elderly. Thus, this project was born.
CONNECTING GENERATIONS
After spending time trying to understand their lives, Lefevre realized that there’s a “new type” of elderly — those who are independent and live an active, social life. She then visited elementary schools and asked the children to draw a picture of their grandparents doing something.
“Children do not regard their grandparents as grey and withered, but as active human beings who add color to their lives,” her project brief states. She wanted to highlight the elderly as “valuable and still capable.”
After that, Lefevre chose four drawings and worked with fashion designers to recreate the clothes that the children depicted their grandparents wearing — no matter how unusual the shape was. The last step was the photo recreation.
“I wanted to create a funny image that’s realistic but not really,” she says. In addition to conveying a message through exaggeration. She adds that it’s “also about bringing the elderly out of their normal context into the children’s perspective. Then the elderly will emphasize with the child and the child with the elderly.”
She followed the same process in Taiwan, reaching out to the elderly through Hondao Senior Citizen’s Welfare Foundation (弘道老人福利基金會).
“One of the things I found amazing was that in [Hondao] activities they have one volunteer guiding each elderly [person]. I don’t expect something like this in the Netherlands. There’s not a lot of people willing to help.”
And while these organizations struggle for activity space in Taiwan, Lefevre says social housing corporations fill such a need in her home country.
She had students from Chungshan (中山) and Longshan (龍山) elementary schools do the drawing assignment. Grandparents in Taiwan often play a large role in their grandchildren’s lives, often living with them.
Thus the activities depicted appear more personal — cooking, having dinner together, slow walks after meals and chatting with each other. The Dutch students, in contrast, chose activities such as knitting, playing tennis and gardening.
For the four recreated scenes, Lefevre chose drawings that showed parts of the local perspective — drinking tea, cooking, hiking in the hills and giving candy to children (many students described their grandparents as ‘generous,’ she says).
LEARN, UNDERSTAND, COLLABORATE
At tomorrow’s workshop, participants will be divided into teams of five: one child, one elderly, two designers and a social worker.
First, the participants will interview the elderly to get an idea of what problems they themselves would face when they get old.
Then the group brainstorms and comes up with a challenge or focus issue, and looks at ways that design can help. The designers then lead the team in creating a prototype for presentation.
Like the Grey Power project itself, this workshop also isn’t about the results.
“It can be anything,” Lefevre said. “The main point is different generations are interacting, collaborating and understanding each other. It’s more about the experience than the final product, learning from each other and creating different perspectives.”
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