Editorial

Workshop 1
The Art of “Entretelas”
COLLABORATION WITH CHELETE MONEREO, PAINTER
May-Dec. 2008

With this first Art and Culture Workshop as Therapy, the debate on Alzheimers is opened up towards new experiments within the research: the arts join the scientific investigation and the qualitative evaluation.
The aim of the AlzheimUr Foundation is, through different workshops, to commit the arts to become a tool for the scientific investigation carried out in the Dementia Unit at the University Hospital “Virgen de la Arrixaca” in Murcia.

In the arts, the senses are one of the basic tools utilized to address and work with reality. The artist’s vision and sensibility towards society make us conscious of the individual’s complexity and the different ways of looking at the world. The arts show the relativity of things and the subjectivity that surrounds the human being.
As reason enables us to identify concepts and discuss them, find coherence and contradiction within them, emotions are equally important in the development of the human being and structuring our minds. They enable us to take decisions, work with memory, attention, perception and imagination in our efforts of living together in society.
Scientific research has demonstrated that our memories reside more profoundly in our memory if the lived experiences have passed through the area of emotions. Therefore, one of the main objectives of this collaboration between the arts and the scientific investigation in the proposed Art and Culture Workshops is that the patients are stimulated and feel induced through their emotions to create a bridge between the past and the present.
This was the reason for converting the exhibition of the painter, Chelete Monereo, held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Murcia to be the starting point of the workshop.

“ENTRETELAS”
In her exhibition – “Entretelas” – the artist invites us to reflect on our perception of the past: at the life of our grandparents and great-grandparents. As a way of following the thread of connections, the artist converts the fabric into her own language. It is a material that offers, by means of interweaving, different meanings according to the generation. Thus, to provide space for interpretation, Chelete proposed “Entretelas” as the title for the exhibition. It is a play on words allowing for a more or less rigid or flexible meaning, according to the context. That is to say, “entretelas” can be understood as interfacing a rigid fabric, placed between the cloth and the lining in some parts of the dress, or clothing, to give it stiffness. Another way to understand the idea is “to be between fabrics”, a situation of being in the middle of many things. Interestingly, the two meanings give the impression of being present without being seen. A third meaning implies the desire to knit, in the sense of knitting together situations or ideas showing a reciprocal respect for one another.
With this idea of interweaving fabric, objects and fragments of memories, the Alzheimer patient, together with the artist, family and the medical team at the Dementia Unit, picks up the thread from his/her visit to the exhibition to lead him/her to the past in order to retain the memory of the present.

Halldóra Arnardóttir, PhD art historian and coordinator of the Art and Culture as Therapy Workshops.