And I’ll be back to perform health for you
Dit artikel is alleen beschikbaar in het Engels.
How do normative ideas around time and productivity shape the work of cultural institutions?
What if accessibility was the starting point for developing artistic programs?
What would cultural institutions be like if they were reimagined to center the needs of our bodyminds?
These questions and the challenges we observe and experience as chronically ill / disabled / neurodivergent cultural workers, formed the starting point of the residency Cripping Cultural Work. Earlier this year we invited four artists and researchers from the crip community to think together towards more accessible, gentle and slowed paced work practices. While we hoped to contribute to a positive shift toward a less ableist field, what emerged in the past months were profound shifts in our own understanding of access. Working together with Ari, Ashley, flora and Yoana we learned about living in crip time, the (in)accessibility of space, challenging our internalized ableism and what it means to ‘come out as crip’. We found ourselves in a community that we did not know we needed.
The insights we gained from this project will have a lasting impact on our practices and future projects at MaMA. As we continue to learn, we warmly invite other institutions in Rotterdam, and beyond, to join the conversation on accessibility within artistic production.
Most of all, this space is an invitation for our community to slow down, meet each other, learn and rest… You can read, listen or play in the library, lay down in the resting space, and explore the research projects of the four residents. Join us in our reflections on gaps, care, crip time, grief, on draining and being drained.
Hope to meet you soon,
Felicitas & Charli
project leaders CCW
Thank you to Stichting Bevordering van Volkskracht, Gemeente Rotterdam and Mondriaan Fonds for their generous support of this project.
Ari is a queer, South African transdisciplinary artist, activist, archivist, researcher, community programmer and writer. They work by incorporating socio-political elements into their works through non-linear forms of expression and narration. They also work with social critiques and visual narratives, specifically within discourses of race, queerness and identity. Within their creative practice, Ari works with a wide range of materials but specialise in textile work, writing, audio-visual and sculpture.
Yoana Buzova is a Bulgarian-born artist and educator. Navigating the world with a body shaped by ongoing maintenance and adaptation. A proud jack of all trades, she is a repair witch, magnetic tape aficionado, soapmaking alchemist, community hairdresser, gardener,and crooked stitcher. She creates installations, performances, and tools that explore frugality, accessibility, transformability, and listening. Her works invite brief encounters and shared fictions, attending to the overlooked, the broken, and the quietly resistant.
flora writes, draws, and organizes moments that bring people together. she considers the body to be a collaborator and archive, through which different layers of feelings, experiences, symptoms, and histories move. the brain injury she acquired in 2019 and how it changed her own relationship with the world, is part of this. her work revolves around grief, deep rest, and crip time. In addition to her art practice, she works in a hospice house and studies to work in the field of death care.
Ashley Nkechi Igwe is a Black, queer, chronically ill sociologist and writer whose work emerges from lived experience. She draws on Black feminist thought, mad studies, crip theory and West-African spiritual knowledges to explore how slowness, incoherence, illness, and grief can become sites of knowledge, not problems to be solved. Her approach to combining sociological insight and poetics is relational, imaginative and political. She favours rupture over resolution and tenderness over performance.
MaMA’s Head of Learning & Engagement
MaMA’s Head of Exhibition Programs
