Video: Drawings come to life: grandparents through the eyes of children in Yoni Lef's photo project (Yoni Lef é vre)
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The cult of youth in modern visual culture leads to the fact that the elderly are too often portrayed as dependent and helpless. Yoni Lefévre, a design academy student from the Netherlands, decided to break this stereotype with photographs based on children's drawings.
Demographic aging of the population is an objective reality of our time. Life expectancy in developing countries has grown steadily throughout the century and has already crossed the barrier beyond which the percentage of the population over sixty is higher than the percentage of the population under fifteen. By 2030, half of the population of Western Europe will be over fifty and is expected to live another 40 years. By that time, a quarter of the population will be over 65. Some demographers even predict that half of all girls born in developed countries today will see the beginning of the next century.
These dynamics are associated with serious economic problems and are perceived negatively by most people. Pensioners living on state support and at the expense of children are considered by default as a burden for the new generation. But Dutch social designer Yoni Lefévre takes a different view. She argues that the older generation can and should make an active and tangible contribution to the life of modern society.
It was this idea that served as the basis for the "Gray Power" photo project (literally "gray power", from a term adopted in sociology for the political, economic or social influence of older people), in which Lefebvre asked four children to draw their grandparents.
As it turned out, in the eyes of their grandchildren, pensioners by no means look decrepit and helpless. On the contrary, colored pencil drawings depict cheerful, dynamic scenes in which grandparents play tennis, plant flowers and enjoy life with might and main. The grandfather of eleven-year-old Ana even grew three additional pairs of hands for himself, because the two upper limbs are sorely lacking in order to vacuum, fish, garden, play ball, and do a lot of other things at the same time. Yoni Lefebvre reproduced these drawings in photographs, trying to bring the photographs closer to the "original" as much as possible.
“Children look at their grandparents as active people who add color to the family's life,” Lefebvre comments on the project. "Their fresh perspective can help shape a smarter and more positive outlook on our society."
And the retired participants in the performance by the German artist Angie Hiesl added color to the life of the whole city by sitting for several hours on chairs suspended from the facades of residential buildings at a height of 5-6 meters.
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