The capacity to feel and express themselves in response to worldly surroundings is a defining feature of who a person living with dementia is, and can have profound effects on the ways in which they think, act and express creativity. Drawing on a year of intensive collaborative work with residents living with dementia in an Orthodox Jewish care home in London, I extend our perceptions and understandings of how a couple experiences their day-today lives, with particular attention paid to their affective practice in creativity. I demonstrate how the affective creativity of the couple emerges, circulates, and transforms as a spouse's dementia develops, whilst feeling bodies continuously (re)make relations and familiarize themselves with the immediate surroundings through the making of artworks.

This article aims to extend the current understanding of ethical practice within a dementia context, in which people living with dementia are often taken for granted as mere beneficiaries of care, rather than as co-producers in day-to-day care practice. Building on a decade of voluntary work and a year of fieldwork (including six weeks' intensive observation of nightlife) at a Jewish care home in London, I pay attention to the affective dimension of ethical practice at the moment of sleep disturbance of a resident with dementia. Inspired by Heidegger's concept of dwelling, I understand the episode not as pathological, but as a process through which ethical subjects emerge in the making of ongoing, entangled ethical endeavors. I argue that ethical practice is neither predetermined nor random: rather, it is the way in which those involved continuously respond and attune to the ever-changing circumstances: what I call an 'art of dwelling'.

This article critically engages with the predominant understandings of repetitive bodily practices within a dementia context. Rather than interpreting such practices as pathological and abnormal, I instead approach them through an ethnographic mapping, paying particular attention to the affective dynamics of repetition. Critically developing Fernand Deligny’s insights and methods of tracing and mapping bodily movements in dialogue with Tim Ingold’s notion of dwelling, I demonstrate affect-underpinned encounters and interactions of repetitive phenomena. I then argue for the extension of recent anthropological discussions about affect, repetition, and subjectivity by suggesting a more productive dialogue among theories of affect, body, atmosphere, cognition, memory, language, and life history.

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