A Clockface Lost in Search of Figures
Ella Ziegler is a german conceptual artist, curator, educator and science communicator working at the intersection of art & science and art & technology collaborations, artistic research, socially engaged art, art in public space and artistic research on emotions. Ella holds an extensive experience with context-based interventions in public space, lecture performances, and environmental art.
A Clockface Lost in Search of Figures is a participatory art project in the dementia ward of the care home Berggården in Rejmyre, Sweden.
What initially inspired the project was Anette Lindvall, director of Berggården, when she drew a circle on a sheet of paper and added the numbers of a clock. She then explained what she often sees when residents with dementia are asked to draw a clock, sometimes the numbers no longer stay in place, instead they drift outward and scatter beyond the circle, as if time had loosened its grip on them.
This image, both ordinary and unsettling, is where Ellas project begins. A clock face usually measures time in a steady way. Here, it becomes a space where order dissolves and things move, break apart and come together in new ways.
Another starting point was a lithograph, The Fairies by Salvador Dalí, which hangs in a corridor of the care home. It leads us to a question: what can surrealism tell us about how people with dementia experience the world?
The word "dementia" comes from Latin and means "out of one's mind". In this project, we do not see it as emptiness or loss. We see it as a change in how perception, memory and meaning are organised.
The physician and writer Jason Karlawish describes how our minds constantly filter what we sense. In dementia, this filter is disrupted. The world can feel fragmented, distorted or intensely focused. Surrealism grew out of the shock of the First World War and also questioned logical ways of seeing. It embraces dreams, ambiguity and the unexpected, which makes it a useful way in.
At the care home: With help from the caregivers, we will carefully and respectfully collect stories, fragments of speech and personal accounts from residents. The artist will spend time on the ward and write field notes about small movements, moods, and moments in everyday life.
At the school: Pupils from Rejmyre School will draw and paint on birch bark, inspired by the residents’ words, gestures, and movements. The works are not literal illustrations. They are open, imaginative approximations of inner worlds.
The results of the artistic research will be shown in The Refuging Pavillion at Rejmyre Art Lab, together with a public programme in form of an interdisciplinary conversation on surrealism and dimentia, with voices from art, caregiving, and social science.
Relatives often find it hard to understand how their loved ones experience the world. This project offers a way to come closer. By meeting the works made together, visitors are invited to step away from fixed ways of seeing and toward a more open and flexible view of reality. Dementia becomes a source of creativity and imagination.
Instead of talking only about loss, the project suggests another approach: to "meet individuals where they are" and make room for many realities. Here, surrealism is more than an art-historical reference. It is a method that lets the line between truth and illusion soften, and opens new ways of understanding each other.
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