Maska - Volume 40, Issue 229-230, 2025

The first outlines of this issue of Maska were drawn some time ago, when thinking about the (in)accessibility of our field of endeavour, which was also closely connected to considerations about the limited outreach of the printed journal in question. With a slight but noticeable and important increase in the presence of artists with disabilities1 in artistic lead positions and performers, which is a result of continuous activism, knowledge that is important to share in the field of performing arts and beyond has been accumulated. For one, it is a way of sensitising what has become a fast-paced routine of art production practice in the ableist framework, which hardly ever has the time to slow down and notice the different needs and wellbeing of everyone included. But foremost, it is valuable on its own, as it develops the tools to build an open and more accessible society, and Maska is dedicated to sharing the knowledge with its readers.

Access, like many cultural spaces, has become contested. Terms such as equality, diversity and inclusion have become clichéd and often meaningless. They are generously broadcast, like bountiful seeds, only to fall on barren soil. Institutions are keen to use the language, be seen doing and saying the right things, whilst keeping their contribution to a minimum. These hollow actions create silent echoes in the vacuum of liberalised virtue signalling. Oh, the irony of performative access.

Language is potent and more so when it is nuanced, distilled, and considered. So what do we mean when we say access and roll words like equality, diversity and inclusion off the tongue? Are these words still fit for purpose? Do we need a new lexicon of access? Then once we have a language, who does it apply to, and how?

Accessibility in culture is often understood as a technical demand, as something that comes after the fact, in a project note, as an appendix to an application for subsidies. But if culture is a place for community and art is a place for reflection on society, then accessibility should not be an additional task, but rather its foundation upon which a just society is built. In this discussion, we raise questions about language, art, theatre and inclusion. What does accessibility mean in practice? Who has the right to understand art? And who has the right to co-create its territory?

Since 2022, I have been part of a four-year research project about disability, the performing arts and mobility titled ‘Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile’, which is financed by SFN at the University of the Arts Bern. The project aims to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of travel in the performing arts, and the different ways artists and productions travel – or don’t travel. My colleagues interviewed theatres and festivals – most of them in Switzerland, with a few exceptions, but all of them in the German-speaking part of Europe. In their interviews, as well as looking through materials such as websites and programmes, they researched how theatres and festivals reacted when the Covid-19 pandemic made the usual traveling of productions no longer possible, and whether this created more permanent structural changes to the ways institutions work.

In the fall of 2021, I compiled a video series about globalization using hand drawn and colored illustrations to explore the workings of monoculture in our globalized society – focusing through the lens of disability. The six-part video series is a mixed media, virtual intertwinement with capital-focused societies and its coexisting ableism. I consecutively explore: globalization, how ableism moves through capitalist ideologies and creates body-mind hierarchies, the rise and dominance of monoculture as nation-states and societies are formed, the removal of undesired bodies in said societies, and the liabilities placed on them to justify processes of removal and erasure.