As people with disability know intimately, maneuvering normative able-bodied relations and built environments is taxing. Whether access can be provided by an institution, primarily depends on the willingness of individuals; on the disabled person to disclose their disability identity, and their capacity to convey to a member of the staff what being included looks like for them. No small feat and a barrier for coming into the space.

Moreover, whenever it is up to the willingness of a single institutional worker to meet the needs of the disabled person, there is ample room for implicit or explicit discrimination.

Without infrastructures in place to navigate access, develop ways of archiving the emotional labor of knowledge sharing and a protocol of transferring cultural competencies to new colleagues entering the institution, access making in Dutch cultural institutions is transactional and temporary, whereas navigating (complex) access needs are relational in nature and ongoing.When does an access policy without a collective practice turn into access washing?

Friction occurs as the lived experience of exclusion and the intention of access making collide. Leaning into the discomfort of friction creates a rupture in the culture of the institution, where we can investigate.... the ongoing-ness of access making, the temporary status of able-bodied-ness, why the end game is belonging, the value of embodied knowledge and the crip perspective on normalcy, radical slowness. In the training Be-longing: Thou shalt not worship at the altar of access offers a frictional anti-assimilationist stance toward access, that can show up as humming/singing, embodied archiving, storytelling, reflective writing, recognition reading.

2023 | BAK | BASIS VOOR ACTUELE KUNST | UTRECHT NL