Compassionate Commons for Generation festival 2026
Compassionate Commons joins this year’s Generation Festival with a workshop on the veteran boat Granvin. The programme includes a pop-up exhibition featuring work by Olinde Peetre, Jérôme Picard, Wolfgang Schmid, Eamon O’Kane, and Elida Mosquera, as well as a workshop around Soft Words — a compassionate travelling furniture piece designed with Mika Obiacoro and Ella Sundmark.Soft Words / Mots doux asks a simple question: What shape can compassion take when it take a domestic form?
This interactive installation gathers visitors’ experiences, memories and reflections about the places where they live. In response to this year’s festival theme — hope — it invites us to ask: What do we hope for in the face of our own ageing, and an ageing society? How can hope help us become more enduring, wise and courageous? And is it ever too late to hope?
Through writing, drawing and storytelling, visitors are invited to share memories of care, belonging, hope — and sometimes hopelessness — connected to their built and everyday living environments.
Made of rounded corners, carefully chiselled wooden plates wrapped around a timber frame, and colourful bands, Soft Words / Mots doux becomes a mobile set of furniture within everyone’s reach. It can move, gather people, host conversations, and collect postcards: small fragments of lived experience, held together in a shared architecture of care.
Grönkullagatan 41, Olinde Peetre
This project by Olinde Peetre explores how an existing trygghetsboende, or senior safety housing, can be transformed to better support ageing at home. Using Grönkullagatan 41 in Helsingborg as a case, the project responds to an ageing population, increasing home-based care, and the need for more accessible, social and dignified living environments.
The proposal reworks selected apartments and the communal ground-floor area. Three apartment types address different life situations: a wheelchair user living alone, a couple where one partner needs care, and three friends sharing a home. The design improves accessibility, bathroom layouts, care conditions, flexibility and daylight. The communal space is redesigned as a social hub with zones for cooking, dining, lounging, events and shared activities. Overall, the project argues that architecture and interior design can support independence, care, community and wellbeing in later life.
Nursing the care, Elida Mosquera (LOCAL)
Nursing the Care is an innovative initiative that aims to integrate healthcare services, staff, and comprehensive care into Danish Social Housing. The project is a first prize winner of international competition Neighbourhood for Generation and was presented at the 28th UIA World Congress 2023 in Copenhagen.
By taking care of the people who take care of us, we can create a positive cycle that includes older individuals and multiple generations. This is what we aim to achieve together in Axelborg. By 2060, one-third of all Europeans will be over 65 years old. Like other European countries, Denmark is facing an increasing shortage of care personnel, and nursing home costs are a burden on municipalities. Housing costs for nurses are at a record low. Modern healthcare services contribute to longer lifespans, but many elderly experience isolation, loneliness, and cognitive decline. Social contact and resident participation are necessary. Overburdened welfare systems need compassionate communities.
Axelcare prioritizes health services in neighbourhoods for an aging society.
Axelbo transforms apartments into lifetime and care homes with accessible spaces for multi-generational living.
Last(ing) Music – Island Life and Death
Wolfgang Schmid and Jill Halstead’s film – on music at end of life
What is a song, and what is its power? Last(ing) Music explores these questions through the story of Kari, a 49-year-old woman receiving palliative care, and her relationship with the song The Boy from Ipanema, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald. Based on music therapy research, the film traces Kari’s experiences with this song, showing how music can stay with us by holding memories, emotions, and our sense of self across time.
The film offers a gentle reflection on the role of music at the end of life, and how songs can sustain relationships and self-expression in moments when illness begins to isolate and silence us.
Last(ing) Music will be of interest to anyone who wonders why music matters so much in our lives, especially students and professionals in all areas of healthcare and the arts.
School of Generational Storytelling, Sligo, Ireland
Eamon O’Kane and Chelsea Canavan
The School of Generational Storytelling is a year-long community art project led by Eamon O’Kane with Chelsea Canavan across six care homes in Sligo. Through workshops in storytelling, visual art and music, the project invited residents to share memories, express themselves and build intergenerational connections. Working closely with staff, the artists tailored activities to each resident’s interests, needs and cognitive abilities. A key outcome is a set of bespoke creative toolkits, gifted to care homes for daily use by activity coordinators and families. The project shows how art can support communication, wellbeing and care within everyday residential settings over time.
