Per/forming Care: New Visions and ImaginingsVarious artists
This conference features a range of artistic and performative contributions, integrated into the program in various ways. Some are part of the parallel session panels. Others are presented in plenary formats, recurring iterations, or as ongoing exhibits throughout the conference. This page highlights the latter.
On Friday, 24 January, from 17:00-18:30, conference participants are invited to explore a variety of artistic contributions presented outside the parallel sessions. These include live performances and installations, a video installation, a sculpture exhibition, photography, and other works inspired by the conference themes. Participants will also have the unique opportunity to meet the artists and engage in conversations about their work and creative processes.
My Mother’s MaterialBax & Bax
My Mother’s Material is an art performance by mother and child. This intergenerational dialogue explores the sediments of care and material culture that are present in our maternal line, and our ambiguous and paradoxical relationships with those sediments. It is an attempt to portray the positive as well as the negative effects being gendered as female has on our health, capabilities, connections, our being-in-our-bodies and being-towards-our-bodies, on motherhood, childhood, and womanhood. The performance is a ritual in which mother and child connect through costumes, archival footage, and in sharing a cup of tea by way of the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu).
Performance and costumes: Atty Bax and Hanna Bax
Film and assistant: Cansu Koça
Music: Nils Juijn
This performance will take place on Friday, 24 January, in the plenary room, Steyl, starting at 17:00.
Hanna Bax is a Master Student of Humanistic Studies at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, the Netherlands, with a background in philosophy – specifically philosophy of psychiatry, – phenomenology, Japanese aesthetics, and Zen Buddhism. They are also an official student of the Japanese tea ceremony or chanoyu at Urasenke Tankokai Belgium. Combining these studies and practices, and their love for illustration and dance, they intend to become a spiritual counsellor specialized in ritual, ceremony, and art as care.
Atty Bax, born in Vlissingen (1965), is a visual artist working on the edges of feminism, eroticism, and textiles. A totem is a natural or spiritual artefact, being or animal that holds a personal and symbolic meaning for an individual. Her sculptures are like totems to her. They are created through the shaping of her feelings and experiences, whether it happens consciously or unconsciously, with a great love for materials. She graduated in 1988 and started her career as a performance artist working internationally with theatrical rituals trying to unite body and mind. Nowadays, she makes sculptures and artefacts mostly with beads, celebrating the physical.
Website: www.attybax.com
Instagram: @atty.bax
253 ways to care
(2024, single channel video) Merel Visse
In his essay Care Comes in the Wake of Retreat, critical theorist Michael Stone-Richards argues that the “West” is “in abandonment.” This abandonment manifests as a downfall of connection with others, a trend that drags much of the world along with it. Further bolstering this argument, Jan Patočka describes a “loss of ground” – a feeling of disconnection and alienation from both our built and natural environment, and from each other. This cycle of neglect takes a heavy toll. It leaves us feeling adrift, without inspiration, ultimately harming the very spaces we inhabit.
My single channel video is designed to inspire everyone who yearns to reconnect with the built and natural environment around them: ordinary persons, family members, professionals like developers, planners, architects, artists, designers, or builders – even public officials, local representatives, business owners, and neighbors. Growing up in a family of builders and architects ignited my fascination with the work of the late architect Christopher Alexander, particularly his seminal works, A Timeless Way of Building, A Vision of a Living World, and A Pattern Language. He presented 253 patterns that relate to how we aesthetically experience the built and natural environment. Think of his “patterns” as aesthetic qualities that might be considered in caring architecture, like a home, neighborhood, or city. For example, Pattern 187, the Marriage Bed. “It is crucial that the couple choose the right time to build the bed, and not buy one at the drop of a hat,” Alexander wrote. “It is unlikely the bed can have the right feeling until the couple has weathered some hard times together and there is some depth to their experience.”
This video explores the intersection of this architectural, aesthetic philosophy and care ethics through footage of ubiquitous space, my conceptual drawings and everyday experiences. We don't just inhabit spaces; by making and repairing them, from homes to entire cities, we engage in practices of creation and care – practices that ultimately define how we live.
ReferencesAlexander, C. (2020). The nature of order: An essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe, book three: A vision of a living world. The Center for Environmental Structure Publishing.
Alexander, C. (2018). A pattern language: Towns, buildings, construction. Oxford University Press.
Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. Oxford University Press.
Stone-Richards, M. (2017). Care comes in the wake of retreat. e-flux Architecture. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/future-public/151953/care-comes-in-the-wake-of-retreat/
This video installation will be on display throughout the conference in the plenary room, Steyl. You can meet the artist there on Friday, 24 January, from 17:45-18:30.
Merel Visse is an academic, artist, editor, and educator who, for three decades, successfully initiated various grant-funded, innovative, cross-disciplinary programs with civic and academic impact. She holds faculty positions at Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies (U.S.A.), where she chairs a Graduate Program, and at the University of Humanistic Studies. Merel serves on several editorial boards of Visual Art and Education journals, co-founded the Meaningful Artistic Research Program in The Netherlands, and the Art & Care Platform Series. Merel was an artist in residence at the NY School of Visual Arts and the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn. She is fortunate to call both the United States and the Netherlands home. www.merelvisse.com
Meaningful Artistic Research
This exhibition, curated by Marieke Folkers, will showcase works by recent graduates from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. More information to be added.
This exhibition will be on display throughout the conference in the plenary room, Steyl. You can meet the curator and artists there on Friday, 24 January, from 17:45-18:30.
Out of Love, Out of NecessityTjitske Sluis
As a documentary photographer with a background in photojournalism and humanistic studies, I aim to illuminate the profound impact of care within society through visual storytelling. Through a lens focused on themes of sickness, disability, death, and the complexities of caregiving, my work delves into the intricacies of human vulnerability and interdependence that are often kept in the shadows. In doing so, I seek to explore photography’s potential as a form of artistic research that can help foster a visual ethics of care when words fail.
During this talk, I will discuss the documentary exhibition entitled “Out of Love, Out of Necessity”, featuring an award-winning series of photographs documenting my mother’s final four months. These images show the delicate balance between loss of autonomy and the complex act of surrendering it, portraying the things we face when we die, as well as the challenges faced by caregivers when they help, or feel forced to help. Each image serves as a visual narrative, inviting contemplation on the ethics and aesthetics of care at life’s end, while simultaneously evoking intense feelings of love, care, grief, missing, and pain.
This photography exhibition will be on display throughout the conference in the plenary room, Steyl. You can meet the artist there on Friday, 24 January, from 17:45-18:15.
Tjitske Sluis is a Dutch photographer based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, who came to photography through journalism. At the Dutch newspaper Dagblad De Limburger, she found herself drawn to the storytelling power of photographs, developing a career in reportage before going freelance as a documentary photographer. Sluis’ moving series Out of Love, Out of Necessity documents the photographer’s mother during the final stages of her life, while Sluis cared for her. Sluis’ camera became an important coping device during this period of grief and disorientation and her mother, Teuntje, found a tension-relieving humour in being photographed as they created the series together. The series is about vulnerability, transience, and learning how to cope with the death of a loved one, capturing tender, intimate moments. Empowered to use her photography to bring about meaningful change, Sluis is now pursuing a master’s degree in care ethics. https://tjitskesluis.nl/
The Beauty and Power of the Uniform in Theatre and Medicine (artistic/performative contribution)Nora Korfker & Lotte van den Berg
We are an actress and a medical student/care ethicist. Our contribution is a performance in which we draw a comparison between the medical world and the theatre. In the performance, we will show the beauty and power of the uniform in these two worlds. The audience will watch two characters, a doctor and an actress, both performing their own morning routine. They move into the same room, but do not see each other. A conversation is held between the doctor and the patient (actress), highlighting first the doctor's perspective and then the patient's perspective. In this, it becomes clear that the patient is subordinate to the doctor and feels unacknowledged. Later, the two characters meet again: the doctor goes to a performance of the actress. There the doctor is confronted with how the actress experienced the conversation and thus with her own behaviour. The doctor, during that performance, also feels unacknowledged by the actress. As a result, she thinks back on the conversation and comes to the conclusion that the patient must have felt the same way she feels now. The message of the performance is that power is enclosed with wearing a uniform. (Doctor: white coat; actress: costume). It is important to be aware of this, break through it and reciprocate with the other. After the performance there will be a small piece for the audience to read in which the care ethic background of this performance will be explained in more detail.
This performance will be presented twice during the parallel sessions “Art in Caring Spaces” and “Arts in Care.” A third performance, including the opportunity to meet the artists, will take place on Friday, 24 January, from 17:45-18:15 in room Congo.
Nora Korfker, 24 years old, graduated in 2022 from the acting department at HKU Utrecht University of the Arts, the Netherlands. She is active in the Dutch theatre and movie scene in the Netherlands. She is not only an actor, she also makes theatre herself. Theatre is about telling stories and making people aware of subjects they may have never thought about. She loves to combine her strengths with Lotte on this subject.
Lotte van den Berg, 25 years old, graduated from the Master in Care Ethics and Policy at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and is currently completing the master of medicine at Erasmus University. She will complete her final elective internships in (acute) psychiatry and rehabilitation medicine. For the Master's in Care Ethics and Policy, she wrote her thesis on having a chronic illness in the physician world, partly from her own experiences as a chronically ill doctor-to-be. She recently published an article on physicians living with chronic illness in the physician world. Co-written with Dr. Alistair Niemeijer and Prof. Alice Schippers, the article was published in the
Dutch Journal of Health Care and Ethics.
Callisthenics: Stories of Support, Aversion, and LovePaloma Bouhana, Henny Dörr & Philippine Hoegen
Abstract
A performance piece about being untrained, unprepared, and unwilling for care giving and receiving.
The piece deals with unmentionable aspects of informal care, through the lens of intergenerational personal experiences. Drawing from the heavy emotional and physical load of caring for parents, partners, or siblings, the narrative explores themes of conflicting needs and desires, paradoxes in care relationships, and the interplay between love and revulsion.
The performance brings together a constellation of three generations of artworkers who believe in, and practice, art as a place of mutual care, artistic exchange, and solidarity. Performance is the medium that connects us, both as method and as dissemination of our work and research.
The performance is rooted in lived experiences of informal care, collaborative explorations and research-through-doing.
The performers embody various roles shifting between them fluidly to speak of the multifaceted nature of care relationships. Through “showing doing”, they explore the physical and emotional weight of caregiving, the contrasts and the paradoxes of responsibilities.
This performance will be presented in three iterations: during the opening night on Thursday, 23 January, during the parallel session “The Weight of Care” on Friday, 24 January (13:15-14:45); and during the plenary session “Per/forming Care: New Visions and Imaginings” on Friday afternoon (17:00-18:30), starting around 17:45. The performance takes place in the Lounge KonneKt area on the ground floor.
Paloma Bouhana is an artist based in Brussels (BE). After a Master in Economics she graduated from the Design Academy of Eindhoven in 2018. Shifting her approach permitted her to orient her artistic research towards blind spots in mainstream economics like radical equality, feminist ethics of care, or the social relationship of value-labor. Her installations combine mediums like performance, video, scenography, and costume design. She has been working with artists like Rossella Biscotti, Laure Prouvost, Goda Palekaite. and Philippine Hoegen. In her last installation, supported by the Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie and entitled “A matrix is a plate of biscuits”, she questions through field research, mold-making, and songwriting, why the thinking that grows from physical labor has been relegated to a lower status. In September 2024, she started a six-month residency at Morpho, Antwerp, during which she will develop an economically abnormal work song.
Henny Dörr (MA), theatre scientist and dramaturg, works as a researcher and lecturer at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. Their focus has also always been on creative and performative processes and practices that transgress the boundaries of disciplines.
Between 1990 and 2021, they developed a range of bachelor and master courses on theatre design, (interactive) performance design, and scenography. Until 2021, they headed the international MA Scenography program, which strongly focuses on expanding forms of scenography and contemporary ideas on spectatorship. As course director and tutor, they created an inclusive learning and research environment and challenged conventional views of knowledge transfer. The international context in which they work as a teacher leads to ongoing, in-depth critical reflection on their pedagogy, their biases, and their “constructive” naivety within an intercultural art and design context.
As researcher in the professorship Expanding Artistic Practices of HKU, Henny Dörr works in transdisciplinary teams that develop co-creative processes between art and (health) care. This artistic research practice is supported by detailed investigation into the impact on the agents and voices involved, the artistic methods and strategies that are put in operation, and the ethical dilemmas that come to the surface.
Philippine Hoegen is an artist based in Belgium and The Netherlands, working mainly with performance as an artistic medium and as a research strategy. Hoegen is currently a researcher and PD Candidate at the Professorship Expanding Artistic Practices, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, with the project Performing Working*, in which she looks at work through the lens of performance and performance through the lens of work. Who are we when we work, and who are we when we don’t, or can’t? She problematizes the championing of waged work above all other activities and its status as a condition for citizenship and social participation. She looks at the social exclusion that this causes for different people, exploring the value of hidden and unwaged work and the dynamics of the invisibilization of those doing it.
* Performing Working is a Professional Doctorate project conducted in HKU University of the Arts Utrecht as part of a new, practice-led professional education line that started in 2023 within Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences, equivalent to a PhD.
The Loneliness of Illness Truus Teunissen
The sculpture group The loneliness of illness depicts the capricious life paths of people with chronic illnesses with knotty, torn, and broken driftwood from the river Waal. The transparent and hardly visible blocks depict the obstacles which arise due to illness as encountered on their life paths.
Living with chronic illness(es) means being limited at times in what I can do. Irregularity and capriciousness are always present. Living with illness requires energy and needs attention. It is a bit like work, but then 24/7.
Like everybody else I have the need to belong, to belong with others, and to be able to participate in society. My chronic illness is invisible to others. Usually people do not recognize that I am ill or that the illness is chronic. They think that you will simply get better again and are amazed that you don’t. This happens again and again.
I want to feel connected to the other(s). The loneliness of illness can also be found here because this connection is sometimes so difficult. Looking after and caring for others is important for me but with a chronic illness I have to take care of myself also. Self-care is necessary to not make the illness even worse. It is difficult to be there for others at times.
A chronic illness threatens my identity. I am a whole person and do not want to be reduced to an ill part of my body, to become the illness. Life often turns into a liminal phase, being in a permanent transition between healthy and ill and vice-versa, a kind of no man's land. Recovery after a period of illness is always followed by another downfall, again and again, in endless repetition, a discouraging backpack reinforcing the feeling of loneliness.
With resignation I try to bear and endure life with illness. Not a passive or apathic but active and "agreeing with life," letting it be as it presents itself now, and not resisting: facing the fact that this is now my reality. All this with gentleness, compassion and sympathy for this body that has to bear and endure so much.
This sculpture group will be on display throughout the conference in the corridor that connects the conference rooms for the parallel sessions. You can meet the artist there on Friday January 24, from 18:00-18:30.
Truus Teunissen is a visiting researcher at the Department of Care Ethics of the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht and at the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing in Leiden. She is also a committee member in two research programs of ZonMw, The Hague, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on Patient and Public Involvement (PPI), justice, care ethics, inclusivity, art & health, and experiential knowledge. She works with auto-ethnographic, phenomenological, and arts-based research methods. In 2014, she obtained her PhD on criteria and needs of patients and clients in research, care, and policy. Since then, she has been involved in decision-making in the health research cycle, both as a researcher and as an expert by experience. She also translates her lived experiences such as vulnerability, strength, and belonging, into sculptures and paintings, and uses these in projects, publications, and exhibitions.
Reclaiming Maternal Lineage: The “Parricida” Performance as an Act of Care and Resistance Zoya Sardashti
“Parricida,” is a durational ritual set within a restroom space, challenging the patriarchal norm of familial name inheritance through intimate one-to-one engagements. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s metaphorical use of parricide in "Letter to My Father" to critique authoritarian structures, “Parricida” is an act of resistance against these norms, employing care as its core methodology. Participants, prompted by an attendant while they wash their hands, engage in dialogues reflecting on identity changes if their maternal name was inherited instead of their paternal. This scenario encourages participants to inscribe their first names along with both parents' family names on the restroom mirrors, symbolically reclaiming their maternal lineage.
Theoretically, the intervention draws on feminist care ethics, emphasizing performative and body-centric aspects of care as aesthetic and resistive practices. This re-naming act, documented through participant-photographed reflections and their subsequent sharing, serves as both a personal and communal reclamation, and a broader commentary on gender equality.
Empirically, the study employs qualitative analysis of the documented dialogues and visual data, illustrating how such interventions can significantly alter perceptions of identity and lineage. This not only foregrounds underrecognized maternal histories but also amplifies narratives that challenge patriarchal oppression, fostering a discourse on gender equality through creative acts of care.
The performative intervention will contribute to the dialogue on how artistic practices can be reimagined as acts of worldmaking and care, challenging and extending existing aesthetic theories. It aims to provide theoretical insights and practical outcomes, advocating for a reconsideration of the aesthetic and ethical value of care in the arts, crucial for advancing social justice.
This one-on-one performance will take place in six iterations on Friday, 24 January, with sessions scheduled from 10:00-10:30, 10:30-11:00, 11:15-11:45, 12:45-13:15. 14:45-15:15, and 16:30-17:00. Availability for participation is limited to 1 person per iteration; registration is required. The performances will take place in the restrooms on the ground floor. In the early evening, participants are invited to meet the artist and discuss the work from 18:00-18:30 in room Congo.
Zoya Sardashti is an artist, educator, and independent scholar whose work merges performance, autoethnography, and socially engaged art. For over a decade, Zoya has led innovative, grant-funded projects and courses internationally at the intersection of arts and social justice. They hold master’s degrees in Performance & Creative Research and Conflict Management & Resolution and have completed coursework in the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at The European Graduate School.
Zoya gives workshops at institutions including the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, ArtEZ University of the Arts, and the University of Innsbruck. They have developed curriculum on performative interventions and autoethnography, guiding participants in using self-reflection and embodied knowledge for artistic and social transformation.
Their performative interventions have been presented at venues such as Leibig 12 with Transmediale/CTM Festival in Berlin, Museion Atelier in Bolzano, and Mare Culturale Urbano in Milan. They have received numerous fellowships, including the Salzburg Global Seminar Asia Peace Innovator Fellowship, and the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab Fellowship.
Zoya’s practice-as-research approach brings groups together to examine intersectional aspects of identity, with the aim of dismantling hierarchical dynamics in language and movement. Their one-to-one performances and group interventions culminate in video, soundscapes, and textiles, fostering dialogue and impacting both artistic and academic audiences. They live and work between Southern California, The Hague, and Seoul.
Will You Carry Me?!Nina Goedegebure
A one-on-one performance and artistic research project into the polyphony of disease processes, initiated by actress and artist Nina Goedegebure in collaboration with TGGreppel, RadboudUMC, HKU, UvH, and supporting artist Rosalie van Velsen.
Now that the term “healthcare crisis” (or even more alarmingly, “healthcare infarction”) has become commonplace and awareness is growing about the need to care for each other differently, the medical world still largely operates from a substantial body image and a system focused on efficiency, standardization, and costs. This of course has led to massive innovations and successes, but it has also pushed the diversity and complexity of “being human” within that body and disease process to a sideline. Yet, it is perhaps in hospitals where we are most human; vulnerable, dependent, uncertain, hopeful, grateful. And not only the patient; doctors, assistants, nurses, surgeons – in short, everyone involved in healthcare encounters this system and carries significant vulnerabilities and responsibilities.
As a patient and the wife/mother of a husband and children with a life-altering condition, artist Nina Goedegebure experienced this gap between a substantial view in the hospital and life itself on many occasions and encounters in the Dutch healthcare system. It raised the question: What is present? And what is allowed to be present? Which voices do we actually include in a disease process? And how do we carry ourselves and others in it?
Nina Goedegebure started to approach these questions by giving images to her own voices, using a needle, thread, and beads. This marked the beginning of Will You Carry Me?!, a transdisciplinary project that integrates performance, artistic work (embroidery), research, and transformative learning with the aim of placing the human more centrally within the healthcare system by investigating what is present during disease processes and how we are carried during these transformative times.
‘Let us together create space for a care system that is carried by the many voices shaping it."
About the performance
In this one-on-one performance that premieres at the CERC Conference, participants are asked to give imagination to one of the inner voices that they carry (or carried) with them, during a disease process. This can be in various roles; as a patient, partner, caretaker, medical practitioner, and so on. Everything is true, we see what arises in the moment. These voices are then retrieved and stored in a Narrative Collection. Afterwards, Nina Goedegebure will embroider the voices on a collection of oversized white jackets, creating a collection of wearable polyphonic works of art that give imagination to what is present.
This one-on-one performance will take place in four iterations, with sessions scheduled from 13:15-14:45 and 20:30-22:00 on Friday, 24 January, on from 10:15-11:45 and 14:15-15:45 on Saturday, 25 January. Availability for participation is limited to six persons per iteration; registration is required. The performances will take place in Komfortzone area on the ground floor. On Friday 24, 18:00-18:30, there will be an opportunity to meet the artist and discuss the work.
Nina Goedegebure, a Dutch transdisciplinary artist and actress, crafts her work with a profound belief in the inherent duality of destruction and creation. Her artistic practice invites audiences to embrace transformation, viewing the world through a lens that challenges conventional boundaries and fosters change. As the founder and artistic director of NINA+, Goedegebure initiates innovative, cross-disciplinary art projects that bridge narrative and artistic expression. Her work weaves together performance, visual art, and interactive installations, inviting audiences to participate in deeply personal, reflective experiences that transcend traditional forms of engagement.
Goedegebure often locates her projects in unconventional spaces, with the intent of making art both accessible and integral to the fabric of daily life. Her acclaimed performance at the Bonnefantenmuseum exemplifies her approach: inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle's Shooting Paintings, she orchestrated an electronic performance that explored destruction, artistry, and sexual abuse, performing within Galgenfeld by Paloma Varga Weisz.
Her latest work Loeys Dietz – Elke Dag een Kunstinjectie [Loeys Dietz – A Daily Dose of Art], an art book and accompanying audio tour, captures the complexities of life after a challenging medical diagnosis. Through selected works from the Amsterdam UMC art collection, this project offers an intimate look at how art weaves through our society, becoming a companion for resilience and a medium for processing the great uncertainties of life. www.ninaplus.nl
Human Forever
An independent film by Teun Toebes & Jonathan de Jong
Teun is 24 years old, perfectly healthy, and has chosen to live with people with dementia in the closed ward of a nursing home. Why? Teun is 24 now, but he won’t always be. Right now, what Teun wants, feels, and thinks is still being listened to. He is free to be who he is and go where he wants. But the chance that this may not be the case in the future is 1 in 5. That’s why Teun sets out now to find answers for later.
This journey is captured in Human Forever, a documentary created independently by filmmaker Jonathan de Jong and humanitarian activist Teun Toebes. Premiering on 2 October 2023, at a G20 summit around dementia, the film has already broken records, becoming the most-watched human-interest documentary in Dutch cinema history, with over 80,000 visitors. Now going global, Human Forever has won multiple awards at national and international film festivals, including a Golden Calf Award, the highest honor in Dutch cinema:
The third international Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) conference is honored to host a special screening of this groundbreaking documentary on the evening of Friday, January 24, 2025. If this conference explores pivotal moments, or lines of flight, when care becomes art and art becomes care, Human Forever embodies this both care ethics and care aesthetics in action. Through its powerful storytelling and moving cinematic language, the film illuminates the artistic, world-making dimensions of everyday care practices, while bringing the ethical intricacies of caring for people with dementia into sharp, transformative focus. In doing so, it invites us to think with care as a political and ethico-aesthetic practice, opening a way toward new possibilities for a more just and caring world.
Teun and Jonathan will join us to present the film and engage with the audience. Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with the creators!
Teun Toebes (1999) is an international healthcare innovator and humanitarian activist. His mission is to improve the quality of life of people with dementia worldwide. As the eldest in a family of four, with a mother who is a social psychiatric nurse, care has always been part of his life. Yet, while the choice to study nursing (BSc) and care ethics (MA) was a logical step, the choice to get involved with people with dementia was not. During an internship, Teun was introduced to dementia care and since then he has not been able to let go of his concerns about it. How is it possible that, from all good intentions, we have created an exclusionary system in which we ourselves would rather not find ourselves? And above all, how can we change this system for the better?
Based on the belief that a better world for people with dementia is a better world for all of us, Teun made the decision at the age of 21 to live in the closed ward of a nursing home. For more than three and a half years, Teun not only observed but also lived with people with dementia, seeking to experience up close how we treat people with dementia and how we can change it for the better. While living in the nursing home, Teun and filmmaker Jonathan de Jong decided to take this mission to the next level and bring a different story about dementia to the world stage. This global quest through eleven countries across four continents resulted in the international award-winning independent documentary Human Forever.
Teun has a strong social media presence and has been featured in international media. He speaks at international conferences and is the author of global bestsellers The Housemates, Een Wereld te Winnen, and Human Forever. Follow him on social media via @teuntoebes and become part of the global movement for a more inclusive and better world. https://teuntoebes.com/
Jonathan de Jong (1983) is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker and bestselling author from the Netherlands. His work is characterized by social stories that always make an impact, whether it is the personal struggles of world-famous people or topics that affect everyone, such as dementia or mental health problems. Like no other, he knows how to package these subjects in such a way that you never look at them the same way again.
In recent years, Jonathan has made several documentaries on dementia, presenting an “older” problem in a young and refreshing way. This is also the reason why he was asked to make the opening film for the G20 Health Summit, Human Forever, together with humanitarian activist Teun Toebes. Together, they co-authored the international bestsellers (in fourteen countries) on dementia, The Housemates, Een Wereld te Winnen, and Human Forever.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman