Holding Her Fall is an ongoing research initiative dedicated to understanding how elderly women navigate public life across diverse cultural and social landscapes. While aging is universal, it is never experienced the same way. Gender, economic precarity, migration histories, caregiving responsibilities, and cultural norms intersect to shape how older women inhabit cities and communities, and how often they become invisible within them.

Through interviews, journaling, and collaborative storytelling in Ethiopia, China, Italy, and the Netherlands, we explore the everyday experiences and memories of women who have reached retirement age. These stories highlight resilience as well as systemic gaps, including smaller pensions linked to unpaid care work, reduced mobility, and fewer opportunities for social participation.

By transforming personal recollections into interactive installations and publications, Holding Her Fall aims to create new ways for the public to listen, feel, and reflect on aging without reducing it to stereotypes or sentimentality. The project invites designers, researchers, and communities to challenge the assumptions, question how urban environments can better honor and support older women’s agency, connection, and dignity.

This initiative will unfold through multiple formats, such as research residencies, participatory workshops, and site-specific interventions.