A class in the design department of Sandberg Institute called Crip Club (for every body?),focuses on accessibility practices, creating work that more attentively and creatively addresses mixed ability within art and design, and interrogating the ways ableism affects our lives.

Students and tutors turn to the wisdom, skills, and creativity of artists and organizers past and present working across disability, chronic illness, and debility in order to expand our own artistic life practices. Exploring ideas and strategies from art and design that can help increase potential forms and practices of accessibility or what disability advocate and writer Mia Mingus terms “access intimacy,” “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” In turn, we’ll marvel at the aesthetic and poetic outcomes and experiences that such a perspective generates in our collective work.

Centering and thinking through states of disability and debility necessitates attention and presence that is privy to but can also inspire transformation in research, conceptualization, embodiment, planning, temporalities, media and production. We’ll hang out at the intersections of class, race and gender; trouble both the myth of the independent individual and the stable institution; disavow binary thinking about health and sickness and opt for a culture of care over cure; and get real about the implicit and explicit ways in which ableism is imbued in our lives (and how to unlearn them!).

09012022 | Sandberg Institute | Unsettling Rietveld | CasCo | NL