CELLS SELVES - Time to Time

Throughout 2025, Helene Nymann is developing a site-specific public art commission for a Dementia-Friendly Garden at Rigshospitalet, Denmark’s national hospital in Copenhagen.
The project is initiated by the Danish Dementia Research Centre (DDRC) in collaboration with InSitu.

Nymann’s artworks form a sensory landscape of interactive and sculptural elements that blend art and science to foster an atmosphere of presence, care, and interdisciplinary exchange. The garden aims to challenge taboos surrounding dementia-related illnesses, opening space for new forms of memory-sharing and connection.

Designed as a place to slow down, the garden invites visitors to engage in storytelling, co-remembering, and leaving gentle traces for those who follow — creating a living, evolving space of shared experience. The garden lives and breathes as a collective memory in motion.

The design of the garden and the artworks are created on the basis of interdisciplinary perspectives to further our understanding of memory and time. Nymann is therefore working closely with health professionals and researchers to ensure that the garden is both a place for aesthetic and artistic reflection and for therapeutic and pedagogic development.

Nymann and her collaborators use workshops and evaluations with the users of the garden to determine how the garden can create a sense of community and belonging, create space for interaction with the artworks and offer new experiences and sharing of memories across temporalities. At the workshops Nymann employs the ancient Roman memory technique loci or memory palace, which also features in other exhibitions such as Ars Memoria / Memes For Imagination.

Den Demensvenlige Have is part of the project “everyday life with dementia”. The garden itself is built upon four different topics, which all accommodates the user's needs: Calmness, wildlife, activity and togetherness. Touch, sound, interaction and movement are also key elements in the artworks as well as the integration of elements that stimulate the senses like trickling water and colorful and fragrant plants. These elements also attract butterflies, insects and birds. The garden is thereby a dynamic and engaging experience for all senses, opening up for reinvigorating memories and for dialogue between users and visitors of the garden.

Den Demensvenlige Have is an art project and a testimony to how presence, care and interdisciplinary collaboration between art and science can create sustainable and meaningful spaces and memories. Thereby, the garden stands as a place for therapeutic reflection and as a model for similar initiates nationally and internationally.

Nationalt Videnscenter for Demens works with research, education and dissemination on dementia for professionals across sectors in Denmark. IN SITU acts as artistic advisor for Den Demensvenlige Have.

Initial research and sketches were funded by the Danish Arts Foundation.