Public - Volume 33, Issue 66, 2022

Introduction to the issue on access aesthetics.

This article explores how access intervenes in and inverts the usual administrative protocols of art, theatre, and performance. An aesthetics of access foregrounds the potential of access to contribute artistic and sensory meaning to an artwork or performance. Such creative engagements with access, which shift access from being a purely functional mechanism into something that is incorporated into the artistic fabric of a work, are an important way of intervening in modes of artistic creation and production that might otherwise be exclusionary to diverse or non-normative bodyminds. They also situate access as an evolving and relational practice, countering the idea that access can be achieved by completing a series of discrete tasks. Alongside an appreciation of its creative potential, however, it is necessary to recognize the politics of access aesthetics, which are deeply rooted in disability culture and activism.

A conversation between artists Bojana Coklyat, Shannon Finnegan, Jessica Watkin, and scholar and curator Dr. Eliza Chandler which approaches access and publishing from the vantage of centring disability and its multi-sensorial ways of knowing, engaging with concepts of care, crip time, interdependence and collaboration, the limitations of access as “inclusion,” disability as creatively generative, and access as a distinct methodology for artmaking.

Interchange is a meditation on communication commissioned for PostScript, a series on Accessibility and Publishing presented by Public Access and Tangled Arts + Disability. The film is about my relationship with language and my experience growing up with a learning disability. The work harnesses spoken and written language, animation, video footage and photography to examine the joys, inequalities and complications entangled in our shared need to create and connect.

My short audio documentary pauses for a glimpse into the world of described video, also referred to as visual or audio description. I interview a few multitalented people about their experiences with audio description, all of whom with versatile and generative repertoire beyond the brief introductions that follow: Natalie Trevonne and Melissa Lomax, two blind fashion lovers hosting the Fashionably Tardy podcast; Christine Malec and J.J. Hunt, a blind arts and culture consultant and a professional audio describer hosting the Talk Description To Me podcast; and, Andy Slater, a legally blind musician and installation artist. How can film and video be better crafted with access in mind? Having completed the project, I reflect on my decision to focus on audio description and my current relationship to the creative process.

For the past eleven years, despite countless attempts to find a cause, I have lived with undiagnosed chronic pain. My current work delves into my experience with disability and reconstructs my own methodology in order to best accommodate my own access needs. I am calling into question what it means to create a body of work that outwardly rejects the idea that to make valuable art, I must “suffer for it.” Instead, my practice builds upon tasks—primarily breathing—that I can perform from bed when I am unwell. Material explorations aim to make visible the invisible—documenting the physical limitations that are a result of my pain, rather than searching for evidence of its existence.

Highlights from interviews with George Kerscher, Farrah Little, Daniella Levy-Pinto, Amy Rollason and Adam Rallo conducted by Shawn Newman.

Véro Leduc has spent many years involved in different social causes such as queer, sex worker and feminist movements, promoting their voices on public places. When she arrived in the Deaf community, she wanted to produce a graphic novel so that Deaf folks could wave hands to hearing people, to get their attention and consideration. Realizing Quebec Sign Language is an embodied language for which there is no systematic writing, she spent a couple insomniac nights trying to figure out how to write this language. If writing—an act through which language is inscribed on a medium—is capable of communicating, reflecting upon, debating, citing, remembering, and translating knowledge, what kind of writing is needed for signed knowledge to exist? This chapter relates her journey of creating a graphic novel in Quebec Sign Language and her reflections on the agency digital media are offering for Deaf and signed epistemologies.

A conversation between artist Yo-Yo Lin and Tangled Art + Disability’s Artistic Director Sean Lee in which Lin and Lee ruminate on the cultural specificities of language and disability that change within cultural contexts and generations.

In a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood, unwaged/unhoused community members work to maintain their access to a small park that is the heart of their cultural, economic and spiritual practices. Besieged by institutional violence and medicalization, the violences of colonial-capitalism, ageism, ableism, stigmatization and ongoing trauma, their inhabitation of the park is seen to make it “sketchy.” The Friends of Watkinson Park (FoWP) was formed to resist exclusion by gentrification. In working with FoWP I have generated a method called relational praxis art (rpa). With rpa, I engage local materially-based exchange relations and social reproduction practices that build low-income community as a basis for resisting symbolic violence and epistemic injustice: blaming and shaming low-income peoples for the conditions of their lives and the denial of their truths and knowledge contributions. Rpa prioritizes political agency, knowledge production, culture and creativity to generate interventions that assert low-income inhabitation of urban space towards a liberatory future.

The Spiral Staircase Slides image portrays a series of multi-storey residential homes with exterior staircases and balcony landings. In place of the iconic spiral staircases we see particularly in the architecture of Quebec and the Eastern Provinces, we see spiral slides of the sort found in children’s schoolyards. The image was a commentary on how some buildings are so ludicrously inaccessible they are comical, designed as if only able-bodied children need apply.

act normal starts in an institution where children categorized & constructed as intellectually inferior are placed into custodial care \ opened in 1876 as the hospital for idiots & imbeciles it closed in 2009 as the Huronia Regional Centre.

This personal essay by disabled senior writer Dorothy Ellen Palmer charts the last forty years of her attempts to find a home in the family of CanLit. It addresses the interwoven, systemic barriers of colonial control that have long prevented both the inclusion of senior and disabled writers and the building of true diversity and inclusion. Both physical and attitudinal, these barriers include class, geography, gender, parenthood, urban snobbery, inaccessibility, racism, ageism, and ableism. Palmer’s critique of CanLit’s response to the pandemic is a clear indictment of how the arts in general have failed disabled and senior artists and art patrons. She concludes with an invitation to all to participate in the building of a more inclusive and truly diverse arts community.

Rapport defines a certain kind of relationship, one that is not close. Rapport, in other words, defines the closeness and relatability that a relationship should have. This article engages the question, can blindness and sight develop a rapport? It is this question of rapport that animated the 2021 Pop-Up workshop of my play, Rainbow on Mars with Toronto immersive theatre company, Outside the March. The question of building a rapport was not only asked of the entities/characters Blind and Sight but also of the theatre itself and of its audiences. How might blindness and sight come together in the theatre in such a way that does not simulate blindness (blind folds, absence of stage lighting, etc.) nor privilege sight (audio description through headsets for blind patrons only)? This article explores the building of rapport between blindness and sight through the play Rainbow on Mars and the development of, what I call, Immersive Descriptive Audio.

A portfolio of works by artists associated with BEING Studio, a community of artists with developmental disabilities based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Becareful What You Say takes the premise that some things that are said, heard, touched, seen aren’t always what they seem to be. It takes this form in both a literary and visual form to take notice of how our differences should be embraced and should not be considered a hindrance but rather a showcase.

In this article, we reflect on the pivot to online research creation in COVID’s wake, and offer a gallery of ten films that emerged through on-line multimedia story-making under lockdown conditions. We describe what new, online research creation has meant for us as critical disability and intersectionality scholars who work with creative visual methods—both with and in justice-seeking communities. We introduce COVID-era adaptions to the research creation practices we co-developed that helped to sustain racialized/allied, disability, fat, neurodivergent, mad, aging cultures and communities during the pandemic. We focus on the bifurcated affective economies that circulated around COVID, and how these affects surface in the stories of makers who participated in on-line multimedia workshops that we have run since March 2020. While the pandemic has deepened inequalities and disrupted research and arts activism, we argue that it provided opportunity to expand possibilities for disability and non-normative cultural production and to imagine and fight for a radically different world.

Book Review of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment By Jonathan Sterne