Paper short abstract:

In a Lisbon senior day center, the staff and elderly members care for each other in ways that reimagine active aging campaigns in Portugal. With visual media, they illuminate how communal care produces a process of intersubjective self-making through reflections on friendship, loss, and mortality.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I show how intimate relationships built on communal care are integral to the everyday life at the Santinhas Senior Day Center in Lisbon, Portugal, and that the use of visual media by staff and elderly members complicates and deepens the significance of communal care. The act of filming and photographing daily life and events (to both keep an active archive of the Center’s activities and goings on, and to refresh the members’ memories) at the Day Center allows for an intersubjective self-making.

Confronted communally with images of the self and of each other, the members and staff reflect on their relationships to each other, to care, to loss, and to their own mortality. Watching themselves care for each other serves to refract moments of daily life, rendering visible the nuances, ambiguities, and the depth of communal care in the Day Center. It allows for further visibility into the ways a shared local identity is reified as something gendered, racialized via collective memory. Altogether, this creates the conditions of possibility for an intersubjective notion of a “good life” beyond the one imagined by the state and inscribed in active aging campaigns (Lamb 2017). Communal care, especially among the elderly themselves, allows us to consider new ways of flourishing in old age, while reconfiguring care, everyday intimacy, and visual methods used by our own interlocutors (Mattingly 2014; Nakamura 2013).