Unclaimed

Explore this surreal lost property office where you will uncover stories in the most unlikely places.

By 2040 a quarter of the UK will be aged over 60. As our population gets older, we often hear of this demographic change as being a cause for concern. But there’s very little meaningful public discourse about what it means, or how it feels to grow old in our society. How do we experience and consider ageing in relation to our sense of self, each other and our wider society? And what impacts will technological and scientific changes have on the total experience of ageing in the future?

A new installation at the Barbican, created by Limited Space in collaboration with the LINKAGE research team, invites us to explore this topic in a fascinating way. Through some of the personal stories of 2,000 over-70s living in Camden, and leading academic research from UCL’s gerontology team, it examines what it means to age in today’s society.

Unclaimed takes inspiration from lost property offices. It’s somewhere you can pick up items and discover the surprising, illuminating or ‘unclaimed’ stories that emerged from UCL’s research, led by Dr Dan Davis. It’s a blend of cultural, academic and public engagement practice that sheds new light on ageing.

At the heart of Unclaimed is this ‘ordinary’ passage of life that everyone experiences as ‘ageing’, yet it’s often not how we think about it. ‘Sometimes I look at myself, and I just think, “God, I wonder how people see me”. Other times, I’m just that child running round the park that I always was. ‘Nothing changes and everything changes. It’s like there’s this rock of who you are at the most elemental and it doesn’t really change, but you think other people looking at you will think you’re different because you’re older.’

Unclaimed runs from 11th Feb to 3rd May 2019. For more information:

Barbican website

For the full interview with Dr Dan Davis:

Evening Standard article