(not) lovely: Enacting solidarity in dementia care through participatory Arts

This article considers how artists can help highlight the value of negative emotions for care home residents living with dementia. It continues the discussion on arts and health in dementia care by looking at wellbeing beyond mere individual happiness and considering sadness as an integral part of it. This study focuses on Entelechy Arts, a participatory arts company creating cultural programmes for isolated older adults and those in care environments. Focusing on a specific interaction from their Walking Through Walls programme, this article offers a thick description and theoretical analysis of how the creative practitioners fostered solidarity among artists, residents, and staff by validating a resident's feelings of sadness and anger through kinaesthetic attunement. The study argues that by attuning to negative emotions, artists can challenge notions of utopian happiness. This counters the idea that negative emotions must be suppressed to promote wellbeing and enact solidarity as a collective and activist act of care. This is critical in the context of care home residents living with dementia, for whom negative feelings are often interpreted as challenging behaviours that can lead to medication and isolation. Instead, this paper suggests that artists can help re-frame such behaviours as important relational acts that challenge the normalisation of oppressive institutional systems.