Access And Artistc Research – A Dialogue with Lucy Cotter and The Curiosity Paradox

Access and Artistic Research, A Dialogue With Lucy Cotter and The Curiosity Paradox

December 9, 2024

Introductions and Access

LUCY: Hello. Welcome everybody. This is Lucy speaking. Welcome to Access and Artistic Research, a dialogue between myself, Lucy Cotter, and The Curiosity Paradox. And tonight's event is hosted through Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation in Portland. Just a note, please send any requests for multi-pin privileges to our host, Maiamama. Audio captions are available, and we will release a recording of the event with a transcript in the weeks following this event. And we're gonna say more about access during the event as we do our introductions. For now, please know that it's okay to keep your camera turned off if you'd like to, and also, we're limiting the use of chat today.

So, I'm Lucy. I'm five-foot-four, a woman with white skin and strawberry blonde hair with some beautiful natural silver highlights. I'm wearing a gold top, and I have quite red lipstick. And I have a Zoom background of a photograph that I took at Camp Stelo, a rural location belonging to Stelo Arts. And you can see some ghost fungus that appeared overnight on a log that I kind of fell in love with.

Just to tell you a little bit about myself, I have a background as an artist, an arts writer, a curator, an art educator, and I also hold a PhD in cultural analysis. And that really focuses on curatorial practice and how we can decolonize curatorial practice to contribute to wider social and cultural decolonization. And I see the conversation that we're having tonight as an expansion of that conversation and an exciting way to think about the relevance of art and artistic research in the world.

And so, this event is part of a yearlong series that I'm doing called Artistic Research in a World on Fire. This is a series of talks, workshops, screenings, and live performances curated by me in conjunction with the release of the second edition of my book, Reclaiming Artistic Research. This is an expanded second edition. And this year, I'm a project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture, and I'm very grateful that they have supported this second edition and also this event series. So I want to thank Stelo team who are here tonight, especially Marvin, and Stelo Director also, Shir Grisanti, and the board for the support of the book and their support of tonight's event.

So before we go on, I'm going to hold up the book. I love the materiality of books. This book has a glossy white dust jacket with a black minimalist text stating the title. And there's an orange book cover just about visible underneath. It's a very chunky book with 550 pages. And there are no illustrations in this book, and I have done my best to describe every artwork that we talk about. And just to mention, this book is available in hard copy and in Kindle format and also as an e-PDF for libraries. And I also want to mention that if you have other access needs, some other formats are available. You can find out about this on the book's website, ReclaimingArtisticResearch.com.

Before we get stuck in, I want to thank The Curiosity Paradox for facilitating tonight and also especially for supporting my learning curve, and I think Stelo's learning curve, about expanded access possibilities for this event. And the format of tonight's event is really a manifestation of access in practice. And doing this event together is a form of artistic research in itself, I think, for me and everyone involved. I'm gonna pass you over to Grant Miller. Thank you.

GRANT: Hi there, folks. This is Grant Miller speaking. I'm gonna introduce myself more in a moment, but I just wanna do a quick access hold. Becky, I just wanna let you know that I don't see a way to give you multi-pin privileges anymore. I don't know what is happening there. Please feel free to message me in the chat if you wanna troubleshoot. I'm gonna keep moving with my intro for now. All right.

So, there are gonna be two breaks during our dialogue today. We have captions turned on, and we're going to describe visuals on screen. Please let us know about any access frictions by messaging Maiamama. We may pause the flow of the event, like I did just a moment ago, to address access needs or technical issues. Thank you to our access team, Maiamama from Calling Up Justice running tech, and our ASL interpreters, Lavender Cygnet and Sarika Mehta for helping bring today's dialogue to life. We are also gonna ask people to stay muted during today's dialogue. But if you wanna use the emoji reacts to convey any sort of emotion that's coming up while we're talking, we'll be sure to describe that to the space.

So my name is Grant Miller. I use they/them pronouns. I'm a white gender fluid person with really kind of beautiful waves of gray and black hair right now. I have hands that drape like willow trees, which make occasional appearances. I'm also wearing a really beautiful purple sweater, and I'm resting against a virtual background of leaves that are like a kind of stony green that are kind of erupting all together. Let's see here. My access check-in is that my neck is a little bit strained, so I might reposition. Maybe I'll turn off my camera every once in a while to do that. I've got water next to me, so I might just lean out of the screen every once in a while. And I'm also just gonna keep attending to my own comfort. So, you know, just voicing that to the space.

I have a background in dance and theater and performance as well as community organizing and Disability activism. I hold a BA in drama from Vassar College. I did a little bit of studying of community organizing through Harvard's Kennedy School, and I've been doing work in Disability activist space for a number of years through professional practice. I am the Artist and CEO of The Curiosity Paradox. We produce art and performance that centers multiply-marginalized disabled audiences. We also facilitate accessible events and learning spaces, and we consult on accessibility with public, private, and non-profit organizations. I'm gonna pause and pass it over to Jonathan.

JONATHAN: Thank you, Grant. Jonathan Paradox here. I am a white non-binary person wearing some beautiful red hair today. I've got some blue shiny glasses on. I'm wearing my pearls, a nice romper, and I'm in front of a virtual background of some vibrant green plants. My access check-in is, one, I'm gonna take a deep breath. [big sigh] And then I just wanna acknowledge that here we all are in different spaces. And for me, it really is a, it's…it's really nice to be able to feel comfortable being in this setting with you all, and it just means a lot to me to have been able to create a setting that feels good to me and hopefully is a place where we can continue to negotiate your needs, including your comfort, whatever you need to do to be even more comfortable in this moment.

My short personal background is that I am an Access Artist and the Executive Creative Director of The Curiosity Paradox. I'm also a certified peer wellness specialist. I have a background in journalism. I worked for many years in digital marketing and have been a…a performer for many years in kind of avant-garde, improvisational ways of being. And for the last eight or so years, Grant and I have been doing this Disability organizing together. And I believe really strongly in the creative potential of organizing and how organizing itself can create creative potential as well. Paradox is my chosen middle name, and Paradox is really important to me.

Event flow

And so, going forward a little more about what we're doing here, I'm gonna give you a sense of the structure today. So right now, we've been doing intros. And after these intros, we're gonna begin a discussion, a theme called Paradigms. And in the Paradigms section, we're going to discuss ideas about artistic research and access in our work. And that's gonna be for about 45 minutes. Then we're gonna take a break for ten minutes. After that, we're gonna come back and talk for 25 minutes in a section we're calling Praxis. And in that section, we're gonna focus on practical approaches to access and artistic research. We'll then take a five-minute break, followed by about 20 minutes of Q and A from the audience.

This event that you're taking part of, we're taking part of, is artistic research for the three of us. And it's important that we mention that the topic of access in artistic research is being presented within the context of a supremacy culture with roots in settler colonialism. In resistance to dominant culture's restrictive meeting etiquette, I kinda mentioned this before, we encourage you, please get comfortable, turn your camera off or on, come and go as you need. We're recording this. We're also resisting the idea of perfection, and we calmly will voice access holds if and when technical difficulties arise. I'm gonna now pass it on to Lucy.

GRANT: Before you move us into the next bit, I just wanna voice that we had party horns, and we had hearts emojis popping up throughout some of these intros. Okay. That's it.

LUCY: That's lovely to know. Thank you, Grant. I like the calm mention of access holds and access needs. I'm the most nervous one here tonight, although I have been doing public speaking and events like this for 20 years. [delighted chuckle] And I think it's the biggest learning curve for me to host like this. So, in my intro, I also forgot to mention my pronouns, which are she/her. And I also forgot to mention my own access needs despite all the notes next to me saying, "Say your access needs." So I am going to mention them before we move on, and here's to imperfection. My access needs, I sprained my knee a few weeks ago, and it's still uncomfortable. So you may find me standing up and walking around the place. I have two kids, and I've put a big "do not disturb" sign on the door. They may interrupt, you know, or my partner, somebody looking for me wondering why I'm not around. So, yeah, my access needs right now are privacy and comfort.

Paradigms

So I'm gonna open up our little session here talking about paradigms. I think when we approach the notion of access, we may think we know what we're talking about. Or when we approach the notion of research or art, we may think we know what we're talking about. And I think something that The Curiosity Paradox and I have in common is our interest in shifting paradigms, you know, breaking open kind of known paradigms and rethinking paradigms. And so, in this section, we're really going to discuss ideas related to artistic research and access art. You're welcome to send any questions to Maiamama in the chat. We won't respond to them now, but we hope to respond to some of them during the Q and A at the end. These messages will not be broadcast to everyone. And if we use a word that you don't know or understand, please do ask us to define it, and we'll be happy to stop mid-chat and do that on the spot and not wait for the Q and A.

A lot of people ask me what artistic research is, and I'm a little bit resistant to definitions for a reason, as we'll go on to discuss. And that is really because for me, artistic research involves a paradigm shift around how we think about art. I'm gonna pull out two little quotes from my book. One where I say that "artistic research is a zooming out from the artwork to consider art practice. It's a paradigm shift that potentially enables art to reclaim the day-to-day experience of the maker in the widest sense of that term, for whom an artwork is part of a continuous thinking practice." So it's back to that longer practice and the flow and relationship between things that I'm interested in when I say "artistic research."

And another aspect to think about is the term "artistic research" establishes some kind of connection between art and knowledge. It suggests that art academics and scientists are not the only ones who can undertake original research, and they're not the only ones who can contribute new knowledge to the world. I'm quoting the book again, "Initiated by artists, artistic research often comes into being through highly intuitive processes rather than academic protocol."

And my book is called Reclaiming Artistic Research because there has been a tendency to view artistic research in academic terms, and by doing that, to overlook its singularity and its potential. And what I'm really doing in this book, which is made up of a series of dialogues with 24 artists, is talking about art practice in a way that foregrounds how it works with embodied knowledge, material knowledge, spatial knowledge, choreographic knowledge, organizational knowledge, and really resists kind of traditional academic definitions of knowledge, and resists kind of post-enlightenment definitions of knowledge that are exclusionary to knowledges all over the world, many of which are also rooted in the body itself and its relationality to site and place.

So I see artistic research and the knowledge that comes with it also as a portal to decolonization, a portal to work against white supremacist thinking and a portal to kind of reindigenize knowledge and create access in every, on every level. And I see tonight's conversation as an extension of that, and I am also really working to self-educate and challenge myself to see how ableist thinking informs my everyday practice and what I can do to challenge myself. So, do you want to say anything, Jonathan or Grant, before we bring up the question of pacing?

GRANT: Grant here. I love that intro, and I'm so happy for you to just continue to carry us forward into the next bit of talking about pacing and our, and anecdotes. How about you, Jonathan?

JONATHAN: Well, I want to lean into imperfection and the negotiation around access. And I'm wondering about the image in which the three of us are on the screen so there's less…information. Is that gonna, is that just part of the recording, or is that something that we can shift to?

GRANT: That is just on the recording, but I think the reason we weren't gonna have it on was because it would put our speaking out of sync with our audio. But we could also turn it on just so people could have access to that as well.

JONATHAN: Okay. I wasn't, I wasn't clear about that.

GRANT: Okay. Okay. Thanks, Jonathan.

JONATHAN: Yep.

LUCY: So I want to say that Jonathan and Grant and I have been in conversation on and off since 2020. And I just wanna tell you one or two anecdotes about how our practices have kind of come together and at what moment. And I want to tell you this because they are, for me, paradigm shifting moments, and I think for The Curiosity Paradox too.

One major turning point for me was when Jonathan and Grant attended a staged reading that I was doing of an experimental play that I was working on. The play was called The Entangled Museum, and it was really engaging with cultures of display in the British Museum in London and…questions of repatriation, questions of who controls the knowledge of cultures, and so on. And it was a staged reading with a public Q and A to help me develop the work. And afterwards, Grant and I had a conversation around, Grant came up and said, "When you're thinking about cultures of display and The World's Fairs and this kind of dehumanization, you should think about how that intersects with Disability, the whole history of displaying humans and disabled people as kind of spectacle." And I said, "Grant, I'd love to think more about this. Where can I start reading?" I wanted to think about this whole subject. And Grant put me on the road to what became, and is right now, a big research into what's called Disability Studies.

But I started off, thanks to Grant, with two books, Tobin Sieber's kind of seminal book, Disability Aesthetics, which shows that rather than being excluded from arts discourse, Disability has always been present, but in ways that do not center, let's say, the equity of people with disabilities. And the other book was Eli Clare's book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. And that was a wonderful book for also thinking about gender and identity and Disability and working against white supremacy in relation to each other.

Then we didn't talk for a few years, I think. Do you want to…? I think actually two years later, I decided to sign up for The Curiosity Paradox's six-week workshop, Dis/Rep, because I thought I want to decolonize how I think about this. And I also want to work on my own language and language use and make myself more aware of how it relates in terms of excluding or including people. But what I got from that six-week workshop was much, much more than that. It was for me like an explosion in terms of repositioning what I had previously thought of as Disability into really expanded, embodied knowledge. It shifted paradigms all around itself rather than being some kind of a discrete area to think about. And that has been very exciting, and I'm still working with ideas that have come from that.

And I think one of the important things for me in that experience was also that I was one of the only, if not the only, non-disabled participant in the workshop. And it was very important for me to just shut up and listen, basically, and to approach a culture, you know, from the outside and listen and learn rather than coming from the perspective of including from the position that I already inhabited. I'm gonna pass it over to you, Jonathan or Grant.

GRANT: Jonathan, I think your anecdote about going to the book reading for the second edition would probably be a good…. Oh, hey. I got balloons! I didn't even try to make balloons. Whoo!

GRANT and JONATHAN: [chuckle]

JONATHAN: Yeah. Jonathan here. I will say that kind of one of the pivotal moments in our relationship with Lucy, it's kind of, there's two- I'll create a circle 'cause Grant and I were talking about this. Around 2018, Grant and I read something that was, I don't know how to pronounce it, Lucy. Is it MaHKUscripts? There was a-

LUCY: MaHKUscript. Yeah.

JONATHAN: Yeah. There was, you had sort of an introduction to Reclaiming Artistic Research on MaHKUscripts. And the particular article just very clearly showed how even the structure, the thing that you're reading, is a construct. And, you know, for me, reading that introduction was really empowering, and in fact, was a big part of how we started The Curiosity Paradox and felt empowered to do that work. And so, when Lucy had the launch of the second edition of the book, I went to the event and was really excited because the event really focused so much on embodiment. And it was exciting to get the new edition. I got a copy of it. Lucy, you signed it. But later on, I just went up to you, and I said, "Hey, I just want you to know how important your work has been to the work that Grant and I have been doing for years. And we wouldn't necessarily even exist if it weren't for the work you've been doing for so long." That's the beginning of my story. Grant, do you wanna jump into it or Lucy?

GRANT: Yeah. I'll jump in as well. So, I remember about that article of yours, Lucy, that Jonathan referenced, you said something that was kind of like, this article that you're reading is on a website. And above this article is a little counter that has, shows how many people are looking at it. And it also says that this is an editorial, and I'm focusing on these details because these, I don't think these details are beside the point. And in the work that we do, there are a lot of details we focus on that we think aren't beside the point, like how accessibility is brought into a conversation, how an institution or an organization markets an event, how people are paid for the event, how budgets are set for an organization. These are all questions that we find to be really important and are often treated as kind of beside the point by, in many contexts. And so, I think that was one piece of that article that really piqued our interest at the time. And this other piece about artistic research being like an ongoing and continuous project for artists that isn't about a new artwork or individual new artworks. But they're, let's see, I think in your book, you say, like, a multi…. Let's see. "Artistic research as an ongoing process within practice shifts emphasis away from production of new artwork and instead, focuses on a multiyear time span for artistic projects." That opened a lot, I think, in our hearts in how we think about access as a part of our continually developing aesthetic.

And a lot of where we come from, and we'll talk about this later, is a context where people want a checklist for what the right kind of access is. And our approach to access, and we're in a course of many artists who are also doing this work, but I feel like are way ahead of many mainstream and established arts institution, is that we're deeply considering questions of access as aesthetic approaches rather than the sort of neutral kind of add-on that's sort of hooked on to a piece of art. Is there anything else that I wanted to add? I think I'm gonna pause there.

LUCY: So I'm gonna finish that anecdote from the launch of the second edition, which was launched just in April of this year. Because Jonathan came up to me after the launch and told me for the first time what my work had meant to them. And I had never reached out and really said how much of an impact my engagement of your, with your work had meant to me, but I had put it in the book as an acknowledgment. And I pointed that out to Jonathan at the launch, and that's when he told me what my work has meant to you. And interestingly, the launch I had really set up as an embodied event. And one of the four artists in the second edition of the book who had come in for the first time included Yo-Yo Lin, who's a multidisciplinary artist who also engages with and works from a place of chronic illness and Disability. And I had learned so much from her practice, but also my parameters and thinking about that and inviting her were partly informed by the journey that you set me on some years earlier. And in that event, her work, which was a collaboration with Yidan Zeng, was performed by Emily Jones and Hannah Krafcik. I believe Hannah's here this evening. And they're also engaging and practitioners working with somatic knowledge and thinking a lot about neurodiversity, which is another extension of this work and the importance of artistic research. So, a lot of these things kind of come full circle. We better move on, but I asked you to-

GRANT: Wait. I'm sorry. Can I just, I wanna cut in really quick. Did Jonathan mention the footnote, that we were in the footnote?

LUCY: I mentioned it.

JONATHAN: Yeah.

GRANT: Okay, okay. Great. Thank you.

JONATHAN: I feel like all of this does connect to this idea of pace, right? I feel like we wanted to talk about the pace of this event itself. And there is something to be said about the work that originally influenced us, Lucy. I'll find this. There's a short section from Reclaiming Artistic Research First Thoughts, from MaHKUscripts. It says, "Artistic research potentially enables art to reclaim the day-to-day experience of the maker, in the widest sense of the term, for whom an artwork is part of a continuous thinking practice." I'll just say I feel like the work that we do really tries to acknowledge that, that pace, the human, the quotidian pace of making things. And so, I just wanted to point that out.

LUCY: And it's funny.

GRANT: This is Grant.

LUCY: When we- Sorry. When we went to have this conversation, and we were like, "What do we want to talk about the most?" And at the same moment, Grant and Jonathan and I all said "pacing," but we said it for a different reason. They said it because they felt that my paradigms around artistic research allowed them to acknowledge the slow, important work being done over many years, and also, the pacing that's necessary to really, you know, to really make access possible. And on my side, I found that the pacing of the Dis/Rep workshop that you ran was a huge learning curve for me. I had to really slow down and lean in. And when I did that, I felt my own body being present in ways that I normally don't feel during an event. And actually, it was quite confronting, because at the same moment, I could feel the violence of the speed and kind of efficiency-driven way of being in my professional mode, which is quite a norm, you know, for me undertaking this kind of work. So, and I want to mention that for this event because I'm also conscious that many people in the audience are having that experience right now. You know, they're not used to taking time for access check-ins, and we're using a more scripted introduction also to support ASL interpretation. And we're doing many things which take time, and the time that we're taking is the manifestation of that access, actually. So, I just want to mention that, before we move on.

GRANT: Grant here. Thanks, Lucy. Part of what is also getting sparked for me is that we've also been putting out the call to a lot of members of our community who are activists and not necessarily artists or Disabled community members who just like our work or artists who are doing artistic research but might not know about it. And I'm voicing that because I feel like we're speaking to multiple audiences in this space, and that's kind of one of the gifts of having this dialogue that we wanted to have.

A piece that I wanna just voice as well is that there's some folks who talk about Disability being an ongoing creative project. We talk about that with access. We talk about that with artistic research. But to exist as Disabled people means to be working with creative innovations in a culture that doesn't necessarily meet us where we are. And that is further complicated with various points of marginalization: citizenship status, race, gender, queerness, among others, class position. And that we, I think part of what I hope comes from this conversation is for those of us who are…who are constantly struggling or creatively innovating with how to exist in this world, that there's a mode of artistic research of embodied knowledge that we're developing, and that we, Jonathan and I, as artists, have really benefited from the thinking that you present and offer in your work. So, I will hold there now. Thanks.

LUCY: [laughing] I'm gonna add something before we move on! because I want to say in response to that, that I was reading a blog by Mia Mingus, who's an amazing Disability activist and scholar. And she talks about the entitlement of abled people, of non-disabled people, that part of our entitlement is not knowing about access needs. Part of the entitlement lies in being in a position to be able to choose whether or not to have knowledge about Disability cultures or about including people with different access needs. And, you know, this non-disabled entitlement, which I fully identify with in my own position and that I'm really seeking to challenge, is part of this conversation. And I want to just foreground that like decolonizing, working against ableism is a lifetime project. And I personally made this commitment for the rest of my life, and I don't think there's any other way to really engage with it, if we want change. And I do really think we all have agency to make this change happen together. And I just want to thank everyone for coming because the great turnout for this event is a sign of people wanting to embrace their agency.

GRANT: This is Grant. We had 105 people register for this event. We have about 36 people in the event right now, and I really celebrate that. It signals to me that people are interested and that they will get to join this conversation even if they're not here watching the conversation later. So, hello to people in the future.

We have a video that we brought into the space, and I think when we talk about what you said, it's a privilege to not know about access, to not know about accessibility, part of our research is to recognize that we can't always know about accessibility and that developing a practice of asking people what they need and growing a skill set to adapt when you also are doing the work to understand some basic things about a variety of different modes of accessibility, is really important. We really want to encourage people to start from where they are and not wait until they know enough. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna pause there. Yeah, Jonathan?

JONATHAN: Yeah. I mean, I feel like with that, that's a good place to start watching that video.

LUCY: Can I intro the video just a little bit?

JONATHAN: Please. Yeah.

LUCY: I asked The Curiosity Paradox if we could share this video, How is ADA access a barrier?, because this was one of the videos that made such an impact on me in that first six-week workshop that I attended. Because before that point, I was quite a typical non-disabled person in thinking that as a curator, especially, in trying to attend to ADA needs, that I was accommodating access. And one of the biggest paradigm shifts for me was to see how ADA access regulations also posed a barrier to thinking further and to going much further in terms of not only including people, but welcoming them on an, in an equitable way in art spaces.

GRANT: All right. Maiamama, could you take us away?

LUCY: Thank you.

Desire Path: Flower Arrangement #1 Video

[pre-recorded video plays]

[water trickles lightly throughout, crows in the distance]

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: An array of dried plant sculptures. Desire Path: Flower Arrangement #1: How is ADA access a barrier? Lichen on a twig. Becky Emmert, Head of Accessibility, Portland Art Museum.

BECKY: I so appreciate ADA and what it is, and it was needed. But we're so far beyond that. It was written before the internet existed. We're trying to continue to shape our society based on something so archaic.

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Sea Holly. Rebel Sydney Fayola Black, Access Artist, Disability Justice Consultant.

REBEL: I think, like, ADA access is a barrier a lot of the time. You know, people are able to check off a list and say, "Hey, we've done our due diligence, and that's all we have to do."

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Crimson clover. Leila Hale, City of Portland Disability Program Coordinator, Creative Laureate, Co-Founder of Ori Gallery.

LEILA: For me, logically, you're like, "Oh, we must think about Disability and access at the beginning [laughs] of every process and at every step throughout." But for folks in the institutions that I work with, you know, the ADA is a tack-on that put at the end to make sure they don't get sued. We have to fight it on every single tangible level, right? And even intangible, like, how do we fight that spiritually?"

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: An array of dried plant sculptures. Desire Path: Flower Arrangement #1: How is ADA access a barrier? [video ends]

LUCY: Grant or Jonathan, would you like to expand on what's discussed and presented in that video? I think it's so rich.

GRANT: You know, I wanna ask for something different.

LUCY: Okay.

GRANT: I wanna ask for something from you, Lucy, which is setting aside the content of that. We'll get to that in a moment. I would love to hear your perspective as a curator-artist on what are some of the elements formally that you noticed within the video itself?

LUCY: I think one of the things that struck me about these videos, and there were a number of them during that Dis/Rep workshop which I attended in 2022 and '24.

GRANT: Oh, wait. Sorry. I just wanna cut in really quick. This video was for the Desire Path Project, that you attended the virtual launch. This wasn't shown in Dis/Rep. All right.

LUCY: Okay. Great. I think one of the things that struck me was the beauty of this video. It was in itself an aesthetic experience, and I had places to go while watching it. And there wasn't a kind of division between the parts of the video that were an aesthetic experience, that were a didactic experience, that were there for access purposes. It was, for me, just a complete experience. Even, I would say, the atmosphere of those videos put me in a space that made me sit differently with the questions being addressed. I think that was really important. And usually as someone who writes a lot about art and has been an art educator for almost 20 years, I think a lot about the status of the work. Where does the artwork begin and end? Is this work finished, is it multi-part, is the text part of the artwork? So formally, this, for me, was very interesting.

And I realized later how strategic that was in manifesting your thoughts around access art and the need to blur those boundaries and not make those boundaries, actually. And I think that was one of my first kind of…yeah, responses to this work. Yeah.

GRANT: I'm just gonna mark that we have about ten minutes until our break. It's…. A lot of what you said is what I, I'm glad that you shared. I wanna also acknowledge that this, that project was done in collaboration with multiple people who we consider to be Access Artists who were interviewed for it. We did dialogues with them. I think this is even before we had read your book, but we consider this to be a part of artistic research. And that project was funded through Emily Georges Gottfried, the Emily Gottfried Fund of OAJC for Inter-community Dialogue and the Disability Leadership grant that the City of Portland did once. That funding doesn't exist anymore. And that, the funding to produce that project didn't come to us as artists. Often, we don't really get a lot of direct funding from arts organizations to produce our work. So it's really special when we do get to produce our work, and especially when it comes through the context of arts organizations. So, that's just like a little element I wanted to also offer, as well as, again, a thanks to Stelo for supporting the access for this work and us in doing it. Let's see.

JONATHAN: Something that I wanna add that feels important to this, and we haven't, we didn't use this term, Lucy or Grant, while we were talking about this talk, but prefiguration is a big part of this particular project, and I would say is a big part of just The Curiosity Paradox in general. And it feels connected to artistic research. The idea that when we're creating something, we're focused on how are we prefiguring the future that we want to live in? It's…that, that sense is more important than the perfection of the piece. In fact, whatever perfect means, it's less important than us just attempting something that's not currently possible. We talk about impossible, creating impossible futures in our work. And I think that that come, that's a big part of it, that, you know, these videos are one of our first attempts at really making something we hadn't seen before and utilizing what we had at our disposal to do that.

GRANT: This is Grant. I also, something you said, Jonathan, sparked me, and it completely left my head. So I'm gonna go back to something I was going to say, which is that we, I wanna acknowledge that that is the voice of podcaster and audio describer Thomas Reid, who's super awesome, and that our, one of the people we interviewed for that, who also continually advises us on audio description, captions, and who will be doing the captions and transcript for this event, is in the space, Cheryl Green. And so, I just wanna say, "Hi, Cheryl! I see you." Thanks for being here. And then I see the heart emoji.

Something that we also included in that piece are the dried plant sculptures. They're dried plants that are set on a base of a magnet with pitch. And those little sculptures are designed to actually rest on a ring that I, that I've built as well. And so, they're kind of interchangeable ring sculptures that can be moved off and on. And part of the reason, one of the things I liked- We call them "decays." Part of the reason we call them decays was to sort of bring in the aesthetic of decay as something that's beautiful. In the way that Disabled people are often discarded, these decaying plants are also often discarded. And so, that's like an aesthetic kind of coded piece.

There's a term in cinema and theater called mise-en-scène, which is the kind of different elements. In film it's like the different elements in lighting and sound, in how different people are positioned, the costumes they wear that tells a story beyond just the plot. It's the aesthetic, subtle ways that an artist communicates to us feelings about an idea that aren't just the plot or story. And part of what I realized as we were getting ready for this conversation is that we're advocating for a type of mise-en-scène which centers access as an aesthetic, as like an aesthetic necessity. That we want people who encounter any piece of art in culture to ask why isn't audio description present? Why isn't sign language here? And for that to be a part of what is part of the sustainable regenerative future that we're inviting people to imagine and create with us. I'm gonna pause there.

LUCY: I wanna go full circle with that, back to Tobin Sieber's book, Disability Aesthetics. And we discussed how we all love the first lines of that book, where he really, I'm gonna read out his definition of aesthetics. He says, "Aesthetics cracks the sensations that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies." And then later he says, "but all bodies are not created equal when it comes to aesthetic response. There's a long tradition of trying to replace the underlying corporeality of aesthetics with idealist and disembodied conceptions of art." And I want to point to that because, you know, in the art world, we're often engaging with aesthetics, but in ways that don't question some of the exclusions and violence in our concept of aesthetics. So, for me, our work, you know, you have done this in an artistic way, but when you expand aesthetics, it has very deep ramifications for how we even define art in the first place.

I want to mention, too, that I requested that you would show this video, and I watched it a few days ago for the first time since 2022. And I realized that I saw it differently with this gap of a few years because I've been thinking a lot more about neurodiversity and how artistic research can make space for neurodiversity. And that my last event before this one was screenings of Yo-Yo Lin's, artist Yo-Yo Lin's, work, and I was in dialogue with Hannah Krafcik, who I mentioned performed her work at the second launch. And I remember Hannah saying in response to one of Yo-Yo videos, "I love the fact that there are so many layers in Yo-Yo's videos. As someone who is neurodiverse, it gives my mind different places to go, different pathways to follow, rather than just saying this is how it is, and your mind has to be here." And when I watched the flower arrangement videos again, I realized that the presence of those flower arrangements created a similar kind of sense of having your own aesthetic path to follow during that experience. And I experienced them at just another layer that was a kind of an extension of access for me.

Break #1

JONATHAN: Jonathan here tracking the time. It's almost 7:00, and that was our plan to, at 7:00, have a ten-minute break.

LUCY: Okay.

[lo-fi music plays quietly]

GRANT: Yeah. Let's do it. All right.

LUCY: Take care of your bodies, everyone. See you soon.

JONATHAN: Yeah, do what you need to be even more comfortable.

Praxis

GRANT: All right. Let me spotlight.

LUCY: Can I introduce some ideas for the next section as we start?

JONATHAN: Sure. [lo-fit music fades out]

LUCY: Okay. Welcome back, everyone. And we're now going to shift. Well, firstly, I'd like to say that I've changed my background image. It's a picture of some other mushrooms in the forest at Camp Colton that I found particularly beautiful. Small, little golden mushrooms shaped like umbrellas.

So, welcome back, and we're now going to shift into talking about praxis. And we're using this word as an invitation for people to integrate this conversation into whatever type of practice you have artistically, as an activist, institutionally, curatorially, whatever. And to integrate this in actionable ways in your day-to-day life and hopefully on an ongoing basis. I think one of the things that's excited me a lot being in conversation with The Curiosity Paradox and thinking about the relationship between art and access is that artistic research and the arts just naturally have so much to offer because art inhabits a multi-sensorial space, it engages and shapes spaces and architecture, artists create space to choreograph bodies, the arts use things that are tangible, touchable, aural. And in many ways, art spaces can be like labs for trying out different possibilities. And I feel that there is so much available on this level that could be very interesting in terms of moving forward in a kind of anti-ableist way in society.

I want to quote Jennifer Justice from a book that's been very important to me that I want to mention, which is an edited volume by Amanda Cachia called Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. And that's a collection of essays partly thinking about spaces like the art museum or the art gallery, among others. And she writes, Jennifer Justice writes in Chapter 4 of that book, "with an expanded toolkit of accessible mediums, technologies, and practices at her disposal, museums or art spaces have the potential for becoming collaborative peer laboratories." And I love that term, "collaborative peer laboratories." I feel like we're in a collaborative peer laboratory right now together, in this moment.

And when it comes to my own writing on artistic research at the present, I'm thinking a lot not only about who is included, but especially about how they are included. And I'm just going to quote something from the essay to my end to the Reclaiming Artistic Research, I write, "Wider inclusivity is not a simple matter of inclusion in the sense of adding on to existing ways of thinking and working, but rather, the bringing in of conflicting paradigms that could reorient institutions to question and relativize the narrowness of their previous working paradigms." And I go on to say, "hence it matters not only which artists or which artworks are included, but how they are included." And what's very important for me right now is that I think that attending to artistic research as an entry point into all artists' practices seems to me a possible counterweight to the narrow identity-led framing of so-called diverse artists because artistic research draws attention to the production of alternative bodies of knowledge. So, those are two things that kind of excite me at this moment in terms of these discourses coming together. I'm gonna pass over to Jonathan and Grant.

GRANT: This is Grant here. I wanna just name an access friction that I'm feeling in this moment, which is like, I'm approaching my bedtime. It's my usual bedtime, and I'm wearing a cozy sweater. So, I'm gonna speak a little bit more loud than maybe I need to and just try to feel myself move and wiggle a little bit more 'cause I think I just kinda need to. So I'm gonna gesticulate a bit more possibly, and also just voice that I'm now leaning up against a virtual background of a dancing, beautiful iris. It's got these curved arms kind of coiling above my head.

Part of what you just read, Lucy, really calls up for me the way that, like, I'm trying to find…. You talk about how a lot of institutions are kind of looking for the hot marginalized topic of the week or of the year or of the month, and that we're often really reduced to being the diverse artists rather than the so-called neutral artists of, you know, fine arts or whatever. And we get further relegated and marginalized. And with the quote that you just shared, there's this invitation for institutions to really question, how, what is the artistic research that an artist is deeply involved in, and how does that change us as an organization? And I think, I sometimes wonder if arts organizations are hesitant to work with artists who challenge them to reconsider what they're doing, sometimes because I think they know it would make things easier in the long term, [chuckles] but they don't wanna challenge existing structures.

Additionally, I also…I also just…. We have a video that we've brought into this space that we're going to present. But I think that part of why we're, what this section is about is, like, how do we practically, or how do we take some of these theories and put them into practice as a constant growing and developing process? So I wanna say that as a kind of an introduction to the piece that we're gonna show. But before leaning into that, Jonathan, was there anything else you wanted to say?

JONATHAN: Yeah. I wanna first say Jonathan Paradox here. I am now in front of a virtual background of just a beautiful field of pink peonies. And I also am just bumping up my energy a little bit too, 'cause, usually I am, yeah, getting closer to sleep. And so, it's just helpful to recognize.

I wanna point at a portion of your book, Lucy, where you interview Sarah Rifky, and particularly this focus of, you know, in lieu of art being brought to an institution, institutions being brought to art. I feel like this is really…just feels really integral that the, it is…. Another thing we've talked about, it really, it's the artists that will create the change that needs to happen. That it is, that it's artists that need to feel empowered to create ways of continually negotiating their access and the access of who is experiencing their art. That's all I have for now. I'm done.

GRANT: This is Grant. I just, I wanna cut it in real quick and say that there's so many ways to bring creativity into the recreation of an institution that I think a lot of institutions are nervous about. And I think, like, and this is part of what conversations about access create as an opportunity. Like, how a piece of art is described changes over time. What is relevant in a cultural context shifts. So I know some arts institutions are currently working to get audio description or image descriptions of paintings. And I think some of them think, well, now that we've done it, then it's done. But part of what we're kind of calling into invitation is that this becomes an evolving process that changes, that invites people to revisit how we describe and contextualize work. Also, I think that the ways that institutions express things like budgets could be done much more creatively through dance, through music. So, that's just a little something I wanna add. Yeah, Lucy.

LUCY: I want to just go back to the, I think that's a manifestation of what Jonathan also referred to in my dialogue with Sarah Rifky. And I just wanna put forward that one of the things that Sarah, that we talk about in that dialogue is that Sarah Rifky thinks about the institution as a narrative and actually as a story, a story with characters and a story that's continuously being retold. And every time it's told, there's the potential to tell it differently. And she talks about this kind of power holding where it seems as though the artist is just this little pawn, and the art institutions are the big, all-important entities. But she points out that the art institutions are completely dependent on the artists and that their only reason for being in the world is actually because of artists and artworks. And she very playfully starts to kind of break down this sense that the institution is untouchable.

And I think that I've had some very interesting moments curatorially myself in the last years where artists have also reminded me and shown me, in very playful and challenging ways, how much agency I have to rewrite the institution as I go. So, every time I do something that appears to be standard protocol, it could be a budget, like you've mentioned, Jonathan, it could be a press release. So I refer in the book also to working with keyon gaskin, a Portland-based artist who challenged me and said instead of a standard press release, let's do a crossword that I make. So, we used that crossword as the press release, which created all kind of challenges for the slots that are given to press releases in the world.

And this is back to earlier you mentioned that you were interested in my MaHKUscript text. And what I talk about is how all of these small things that look like they're the hosting structures or just the details or the form, the neutral thing end up being the thing that shape what's in the inside.

JONATHAN: Yeah.

LUCY: And, you know, it is in pushing back and realizing that we as artists, as writers, as creators, as access artists have the ability to play with these forms. And also thinking about Sarah Rifky, realizing the power is within us in the institutions, we also have the agency to ask and the institutions we work with to follow us in our creative, playful engagement with these things, which we are doing to reimagine and dream other ways forward. And I'm personally starting to do that more around realizing that I have the agency to demand access needs for others to do with my work and that I have not used my agency to the extent that is, that is possible.

From here, we wanted to talk about how this question of access is not only to do with how you run an institution or how you curate a show, the kind of tag-ons that go with it-the little blurbs, the tags on the wall, the brochures-but actually, how this goes all the way back to before the work is made. How is the artist, how are artists thinking? Who are they thinking about when they're making the work? And how might their work also shift in understanding the access needs also of their audience?

JONATHAN: This feels really helpful-

GRANT: Hey, Jonathan? I just wanna cut in really quickly and say one of our participants just wanted us to also bring in the conversation about ritualizing interruption. And how does the ritualizing of interruption-Himil, I just wanted to acknowledge that's you-how does ritualizing an interruption sort of build within this context and work? So, I just thought it would be fun to interrupt the flow of this conversation as a practice of what you're offering. So, please, I'll maybe say more about that later, but please, Jonathan.

JONATHAN: Thank you. I feel like part of what, you're pointing at, Lucy, about how you start from the beginning, I think even talking about ritualizing interruptions, Grant and I worked, since about 2018, we started with some other colleagues a practice we call a threshold practice. It is a structure that we utilize when we're creating performances. And the place that we start before anyone else is, what do I need as Jonathan Paradox? What does Grant need in terms of creating the artwork? But even more, what breaks do we take to actually stop and digest what's happened? We really, speaking of pacing, we really try to slow down the process so that we're really acknowledging our bodies, our capacities. And so, we're ritualizing the structure so that by the end, the performance that we create or the artwork that we're creating, you can feel within it the intention of accessibility and access within it. I'm done.

GRANT: Yeah. This is Grant. A piece of after, of the threshold practice that I love is it also treats the idea of aftercare as a necessary step to pause in an activity and in rehearsal.

And there's another piece, another bit I wanna speak to, which is the labor of relating, and that when frictions emerge, when conflict emerges, we like to think about relationship as valuable labor. That it's not just the production of a thing that should be funded, but it's also the relationship that should be funded: the time to go out for coffee, the opportunity to pay ourselves, when conflict emerges that we should get paid to address that conflict and see that as a part of the work. And that really comes out of our collaboration with Claudia Alick, who is also in the space. Hello, Claudia. And that rather than seeing certain things that are treated as interruptions, like access or friction, treating those as bad interruptions, seeing those as actually really valuable generative interruptions to the continued growth of a culture. All right. I'll pause there.

LUCY: I'd love to come in and talk about two things. One is you talked about aftercare, Grant. And I just wanna give a shoutout for an exhibition that just closed here in Portland called Tender, a two-person show with Pato Hebert and Sarah Gilbert, which was curated at Cooley Gallery by Stephanie Snyder. And both artists engage with chronic illness and Disability within their current practice and within their lives. And at the public talk given at the Cooley Gallery last week, this question of aftercare was the departure point for the conversation between the curator and the artists. And I realized, you know, by witnessing that talk, that usually, the after impact of the labor that has gone into creating an exhibition is never addressed and is a big part of the relationship. And, you know, by not addressing that and expecting the curator and the artist to just turn up at an opening like performing monkeys and not acknowledge the, you know, the embodied exhaustion of that process is also hiding something, which points to certain access needs of everybody, I think, working in the arts community. We pretend that we don't need aftercare.

And that talk was, for me, also a kind of a manifestation of what it would look like if vulnerability was addressed and also, the process of exhibition making. And as you mentioned, this relationship forming. Because these relationships are also not just, you know, neatly in some professional box. When you work towards an exhibition for two years with artists, and especially artists with particular access needs, you're constantly coming up against so-called interruptions. And that interruption is the interruption of the embodied experience and the limitations, as well as the new possibilities and knowledge that comes in being confronted with these kind of embodied limitations. So I really feel that if we can move back towards process again, that we can make more space to talk also about the exhibition as a learning process and the curatorial encounter as a dialogue, as another form of long-term dialogue.

JONATHAN: So, Jonathan here. Speaking of limitations, I am looking at our time and just wanna say we've got about four more minutes in this section.

GRANT: We should watch the video.

JONATHAN: So let's go ahead and watch the video, and then we'll wrap this up.

LUCY: I'd like to say one sentence intro because one of the reasons that-I watched this full performance-but one of the things I loved about it is that so-called access aspects of the performance, like, for example, ASL interpretation, become incorporated. We start to see what it looks like when you say, what happens if you make an artwork with access as one of the departure points rather than something that's tagged on afterwards? I think that appears in this work on several levels, which we'll see, but I just wanna mention that briefly. Would you like to introduce the context of this?

GRANT: Probably a good idea. This is Grant. The video we're about to show is from the Mouthwater Dance Festival. And we were one act of many in a cabaret performance, and we hope to do a much longer, create a longer version of this piece at some point. All right.

LUCY: This is a short-

[pre-recorded video excerpts play, with Grant providing recorded audio description]

AUDIO DESCCRIPTION: The Curiosity Paradox at Mouthwater festival, September 2024. A small stage bathed in purple light. Grant and Jonathan with their backs turned. Jonathan points an umbrella to the sky. Underside of the opening rainbow umbrella is disinterred to the audience like a satellite.

JONATHAN: [singing] ♪ We're celebrating! No spoons. No, no, no spoons. ♪

GRANT: ♪ Spoons. Spoon. ♪

JONATHAN: ♪ No spoons! No, no, no spoons. We're outta spoons! ♪

GRANT: Spoons.

JONATHAN: In front of you is a white non-binary person cloaked in white flowers.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Whoo!

JONATHAN: A rainbow umbrella floats between my hands.

[music: plucking guitar]

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Underside of the open rainbow umbrella is turned to the audience like a satellite. [rhythmic clang in the music, audience laughs] Jonathan balances the open umbrella on their palm, then clutches it, carried away on the wind. [guitar-pluck music continues]

[applause for a new scene]

GRANT: A description, a story, a rehearsal, a costume change, and a dance. In front of you is a genderfluid person with gorgeous gray and black hair that is draped over their face.

A story. I'm eight, nine, maybe ten. We have a new choir director, and she decides to add a folk dance to one of our songs. I fall during our first rehearsal, and from that day forward until the final performance, she has me sit and watch so I don't fall again. [audience groans] During tonight's performance, I will fall.

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Grant huddles with audience volunteers.

GRANT: All right. Now…a rehearsal.

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Grant masterfully collapse, then waves for audience lift them. Audience volunteers are awkwardly following Grant.

GRANT: Now come with me. Go with me. We're going over here. [audience laughs] Okay! Thank you.

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Grant impressively twirls a gold shawl like a propeller. Grand cascades to the ground. They're lifted back up. They gracefully flop to the floor. [audience cheers and hollers] They're lifted again. [trumpet flutters] Another fluid drop.

The umbrella and the shawl take a bow.

AUDIENCE: Yayyy! [applause] [video ends]

JONATHAN: All right. So, within our script, we say that we're going to take a break now, but I'd like us to just- Oh, and thank you. I'm seeing claps from participants. Thank you for the claps. How should we send ourselves out into a break? Anything you wanna say, Lucy?

LUCY: I just wanna say that I'm glad we finished this section with some laughter 'cause laughter is actually, as Bataille says, it's a way to open up the body so that you can move from the known into the unknown. I think that's a powerful secret weapon in this piece.

Break #2

GRANT: So, maybe if folks wanna send questions to us in the chat during the next five-minute break, we'll come back. If the chat isn't accessible for you, just come on camera and signal to us. But I think we wanna try to curate the questions so that we can just kind of respond to one or two. So, I'm gonna pause. Enjoy the five-minute break, folks. [quiet, lo-fi music plays]

Questions and Answers

GRANT: Well, this is Grant. We are in the final portion, which is what we called the Questions and Answers portion. How did y'all do on questions? I got, I got one or two. How about you all? Maiamama, Lucy, or Jonathan?

LUCY: I had direct messages but not questions.

MAIAMAMA: This is Maiamama. No questions from me.

GRANT: Jonathan? So, okay. One question that came in, there's only really one here for me, which was a request to talk about access frictions. So, "access frictions" is a term that we've used more in our process based on Aimi Hamraie's book, Building Access. They're a Disabled, multiply-marginalized Disabled academic who really talks from the world of design. And so, when they talk about frictions, they're talking, they're talking about friction as, like, the friction that Disabled people as we experience different sort of surfaces as we move through space and time. So, like, a stairway creates a different friction for people who use a mobility device and for people who don't. Or if you're trying to register for an event, and you use a screen reader, and that registration isn't on an accessible website, that creates a kind of friction. When we talk about access frictions, we also talk about them in terms of social relationships.

There was a period when people would talk about conflicting access needs. Or no, they would talk about competing access needs. And I wanted us to talk more about conflicting rather than competing so that getting access needs met isn't just a competition. And then we shifted to talking about access frictions. And one example is we got an email from somebody from when we produced the Desire Path videos who said that the trickling water created an access friction for them. They also said, "Oh, you must not have thought about these particular types of Disabled people." And we responded and said, "Yes, we did think about those particular types of Disabled people. We communicated with people who are our colleagues who have that particular Disability experience, but this is a barrier for you. So we'll just send you a link of the video without the water running." And so, that was one way of, like, of addressing that person's particular access friction.

And we recognize that sometimes when, we like to say in our work that whenever bodies come together, there is friction. We think about this in terms of a dance context. Whenever bodies slide against other bodies, there's friction, and sometimes that friction can feel like sandpaper. Sometimes that friction could feel like dragging your hand over a beautiful flower, very soft. Jonathan, I see you nodding and unmuting. I'm gonna just pause and make space for you.

JONATHAN: Well, I'm just gonna add from writing that you and I have done before, "From friction emerges new ways of being, alternate stories, a measure of one's own aesthetics and paths to success. Attention to frictions can also teach about oppressive systems and institutions. Frictions can also help to assess accessibility. A stairway creates a different friction for someone who can't walk up stairs than for a person who can. For some, friction is barely noticeable. For others, friction can hurt, delight, inspire, or be a barrier."

LUCY: I want to go back to that book that you mentioned, Grant, which you recommended to me, which is Aimi Hamraie's book, Building Access, because that book is based around the history of how architecture has developed and how, as she says, bodies are produced by design. You know, those designs create a lot of frictions, but one of the more invisible frictions is that she talks about how architectural protocol have moved into some kind of post-ADA discourse where it's felt that accessibility needs are now built in as a basic kind of demand of architecture rather than acknowledging that there are always conflicting access needs, and that by moving to a kind of almost hypothetical person with disability rather than the specificities of this, you avoid these conflicts, but in the end, you do not really welcome anyone. You know, there is no specific body that's welcomed into that space.

And I think one of the paradigm shifts for me in reading that book a little bit like when I first encountered your thinking around how ADA can be a barrier was also about moving beyond the idea of including people into welcoming people. You know, how does it feel to walk into a space? And realizing the amount of labor that people with specific access needs do before they ever attend an event, before they ever sign up, before they show up, you know, the amount of insecurity and labor it takes to do anything. And how, you know, people also like me working in those spaces need to reduce that labor, and to, from the get-go, produce a sense of welcoming and then make the space welcome rather than disability feeling like some kind of a medical need. But actually, we're talking about people feeling welcome in a space and equal to everyone else who uses that space.

JONATHAN: Jonathan here. I just feel like wanting to add something that Grant and I have been speaking to for years, and we're influenced by someone that's in the room, which is Carmen Papalia. This idea that access is an ongoing negotiation. And it's a negotiation between land, individuals, communities, and institutions. And I'll just push back and say, I don't know that access is about equality. I think access is about, in a way, just the ongoing laboratory of different ways of being. I don't know if you have additional thoughts, Grant.

GRANT: Yeah, this is Grant. Sure. I would also say it's about equity. It's about working to undo the historical exclusions, damages that are created by systems that are repressive. Sami Schalk, who wrote the book Black Disability Politics, talks about how a lot of stories about Disabled, popular stories, often treat disability as a sad thing. And rather than just saying, is disability a sad thing or a happy thing in this story, Sami encourages people to ask, is disability happening because of oppression in this book? And are we saying the oppression is what's bad or the disability is what's bad?

And I'd really love to bring that into people's consciousness because something you had said, Lucy, in this, watching our video is that people often think about disability as sad or they think about, you know, oh, that story about you falling and not getting to do the show is so sad. But then I'm also falling a lot, and I bring humor into it. And so, I just, I wanted to just voice that piece of representation as it comes into this conversation.

I also wanna bring into relief the ways that access needs are things that all people share, and that people's access needs change depending on their personal story, their positionality, and experience of marginalization. And that access needs aren't just about Disabled people. That's another piece of Aimi's book is that, like, the ADA has basically gotten to a point that the only experts who can really talk about it are architects or ADA compliance officers and not Disabled people. Disabled people are often excluded from architectural processes. Even ones that say they're trying to make accessibility, they keep leaving Disabled voices out of the space! And so, there's a, there's a nuance that I just wanna really bring into this space, is that just because…. That…it's not just Disabled people who have access needs. And sometimes people are Disabled and don't call themselves Disabled. And growing into this knowledge isn't just looking for people who self-identify as Disabled, because often people who self-identify as Disabled are benefiting from certain cultural privileges that make it okay to do so. But it's not safe for a number of people to identify as Disabled for a variety of reasons, whether that's immigration status, whether that's race.

And that part of the invitation that we're putting forward with the ideas of access art is letting go of identity politics being the only basis for determining whether or not someone is allowed. And demanding that people just identify with one part of their identity is the only basis that people get invited, and instead, to really invite people based off of undoing cultural harms that are still, that are historical and still happening. I'm gonna pause there.

JONATHAN: And I'll just add this sense that Disability experience need not just be an identity, but an approach. We speak to the artfulness of surviving as being Disabled. And that while it can be an identity, like most, there is no monolithic idea of Disabled experience, but more to identify or not, being, experiencing disabling circumstances involves an approach that really is artful. And just wanted to bring that up.

LUCY: I want to go back as well to the dialogue with Yo-Yo Lin in my book because she talks also about the cultural specificity of the term "disability." And in some of her work, Rotations, which is a series of dance workshops with another artist, Pelenakeke Brown, they specifically invite people and say, if you are Disabled or you have a relationship with disability. And, you know, across cultures all over the world, there are not necessarily even words for disability. There are entire vocabularies of which we may or may not be aware of in the English language. And there are other histories in terms of what so-called disability might bring or the position of that person in society who may be seen and valued very differently in cultures other than the kind of postcolonial white supremacist Western mindset.

GRANT: This is Grant. My, actually, I'm not sure if I can name this person. You know who you are if you're listening to this. Was talking about leading an international panel on Disability with a specific non-profit and how-and it was an advocacy group-and how someone had used a word that's very stigmatized here in the United States referred to as the "R-word" kind of colloquially. And I just…that a group full of white Disabled people almost entirely kicked out a person of color who wasn't in the United States for using that word, and demanded that they change their terminology. And I think that that speaks to the necessity for, particularly white Disabled people, and white people generally, to grow a capacity to understand the, and research, understand cultural competencies, and not demand that the language you use is the word that other people have to use, particularly marginalized people, in order to participate or receive resources in work.

JONATHAN: So, Jonathan, here just a time check.

GRANT: Oh, five minutes!

JONATHAN: We're about five minutes. So, we're approaching our ending, and I wanted to give Lucy, give you some time for some closing remarks.

LUCY: I'm trying to think right now. [laughs] Let me sit with my body for a second. I want to say that our conversation today is part of an ongoing conversation, and it is something we wanted to share with the public. But we hope to continue to have public conversations together and build on today's dialogue. And I want to welcome everyone who's here and who's going to watch the recording to keep following this dialogue and think with us. And just say that, you know, in a moment of Q and A, there's a certain amount of pressure to think quickly and come up with something. That's not important. If you have questions to do with this dialogue, and you'd like to send them after the event, we want to hear your questions, and we want to hear what you have to say. So I hope you will feel welcome to approach us via the Stelo email address or our personal email addresses on our website. Yeah. I'm gonna pass back again.

GRANT: This is Grant. I wanted to also voice that there were artists in the space who were curious about how to bring accessibility deeper into their practice, and I, or accessibility. And I just, I want to leave that as a question that is ongoing, and that as a Disabled artist, nobody ever told me to consider the access needs of other Disabled people, and then to realize that there are so many varieties of ways to do that. And I just wanna voice that that is a part of the ongoing research that we want to invite more artists to come into and to recognize that as artistic research. And also, to ask any funders who are here to please fund this work as well! I'll pause there.

JONATHAN: Yeah. And with this question of how to make your work more accessible, I think a big question is, who is welcome to your work, and also who is not welcome? That, to me, was one of the first important questions in my work that really changed the way that I create art.

GRANT: Oh, this is Grant. One of our participants also just wanted to voice to the space that not, some people can never feel welcomed. And it's not possible to welcome everyone 'cause there's always gonna be-I'm quoting now-"'cause there's always gonna be a guy who wants to be a naysayer or just a person that makes things difficult for everyone. And sometimes it's not our job to make everyone happy with everything we say in a conversation." And I just wanna connect that back to Aimi's book and say that the idea that access is for everyone and that we need to make everything accessible at all times for all people is also a part of a white supremacist universalizing project. And it's much more complex to treat access as changing, situational, and an opportunity. I'll pause there.

Closing Thoughts

LUCY: I love how, in one of the books that I was reading, the term "complex embodied experience" was used often instead of the word "disabled." And I think one of the paradigm shifts for me before I saw Disability firstly as something quite contained, but through Yo-Yo Lin and other people I've met and talked to and read, I realized that people can move in and out of disability across a lifetime. And Mia Mingus points out that the endpoint of most people's life is a very direct experience of what is called disability.

And I just want to say that, you know, going back to embodied knowledge and how the arts can engage with it and these questions from the artists of how to work with this, we talk about disability as if it is one thing. But the range of sensory experiences, the range of experiences of the mind that we're addressing through visual impairment, through different forms of mobility, through hearing loss or so-called cognitive disabilities, we're talking about entire universes, you know. We're talking about entire universes. And there is a beautiful kind of intersection between artists' practices in terms of the type of senses that engage with and to whom their work could be important. And I think it's interesting to find kind of creative affinities and interesting touching points as a more kind of complex departure point rather than, oh, I'd love to make my work accessible for all. Because this is very exciting thinking, you know. I find the conversations we've had and are having and are going to have are creatively and intellectually exciting. And I think thinking about access in these specific ways will be incredibly imaginative and generative for artists and for anyone, actually, who wants to imagine forward together.

JONATHAN: Well, with that, thank you, Lucy, for inviting us to this dialogue about access and artistic research. Thanks for everyone that has come and helped us with this event.

GRANT: Yeah. We're gonna release a transcript and recording, video and audio from this event. Again, thank you, Lavender. Thank you, Sarika. Thank you, Cheryl Green. Thank you, Stelo. Thank you, Lucy.

JONATHAN: Thank you, Maiamama.

LUCY: Thank you, everyone.

GRANT: Thank you, Maiamama.

LUCY: Thank you, Maiamama. [laughs] Hope to see you at our next event. Thank you. Bye-bye. [lo-fi music returns]