A NOW-TIME ZONE / Four dementia Care Gardens Background: On behalf of Bristol City Council, Swedish artist Kerstin Bergendal was in 2016 commissioned by Willis Newson Art Agency in Bristol to collaborate with award winning architects Penoyre & Prasad and Landscape Architects Enzygo, on the development of a landscape design for a new 69 bed dementia care home, for Ashley House and Brunelcare. As her point of departure, Bergendal proposes to see the dementia care garden both as a combination of a private sheltered residence, and as an addition to the local-a missing zone for locals to gather. The design of a dementia care garden can thus be understood and appropriated as a concrete reason for local interaction. Bergendal and Frazer performs a series of dialogues with different agents involved in and around the given site for the new garden. Their ”lived experience” is intervowen via a process of concrete consultation and co-production of an architectural model, and videodocumented by the artist. These dialogues, which are not used in modern planning of dementia care homes or any other types of intstitutions, act as a concrete test or prototype. The indicative drawings thus are the image of the findings of such a different consultation process. ( see pdf) A key element in the published proposal is a focal shelter, proposed by Bergendal and adapted specifically for social activites for residents with dementia.( see image) It offers not only a goal for a resident walking within in the garden – something to do. But in addition, this small architecture is a tool, mechanicaly opening for the closer link of the outside of the institution to the inside, as well as the sheltered parts of the garden to new platforms for co-production and co-habitation between the residents and their relatives, their neighbors and local cultural association. The Danish architect M C Trabut – Jørgensen has elaborated the model of the to the project. The indicative drawings made by Bergendal and Frazer were published in 2017, both as a separate folder entitled A NOW-TIME ZONE/ Four gardens for Greville Dementia Care Home within the formal building applications from Ashely House, and as an architectural model Second phase:. In 2018, the actual project was stalled by the builders. But Bergendal and Frazer keep open a critical discursive dialogue with agents normally engaged in relation to dementia care homes. In summer 2018, they were invited by Dr Christina Buse from the Dep of Sociology at the University of York, to perform a workshop durng a public conference entitled “Architectural design and construction for later life care: challenges and opportunities for designing with and for building users” the 28th June 2018 at Kings Manor, University of York, UK, arranged by Christina Buse, Dr and Lecturer in Sociology and Social Psychology and by the Department of Sociology of Wentworth College They presented the project with a focus on ways of identifying, supporting and cultivating the concept of local agency and co-ownership, as the basis for a dementia garden layout. The model was displayed, as well as a video sequence. The same day the Dep of Sociology published ‘Buildings in the Making’, a research study following the design and construction process on building projects for older people, in particular extra care housing and care homes by doctors Christina Buse, Daryl Martin and Sarah Nettleton from the Department of Sociology of Wentworth College University of York UK. The art project is one of the projects of this study. The 18th of September 2018, the proect was also presented within the Fine Art Leture Series, at Academy Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.