Klik hier voor Nederlands
What does accessibility actually entail? Is it merely a list of specific aids? Or is it the understanding that one person might be excluded due to a language barrier and another because of a high admission fee? Or is it the realization that access making is an ongoing, collaborative process – one that involves everyone?
Raffia Li (1989) explores the act of creating accessibility as an artistic, connective, and world-making process. They observe that non-disabled people often insist on the impossibility of meeting every access need, while disabled people, in the meantime, carve out space for themselves – exhausted, yet also as a form of celebration and resistance.
As a neuroqueer person of colour and someone who frequently works together with friends who have different disabilities, their lived experiences shaped Li’s artistic practice. Just as poetry does as well as the artistic method Theatre of the Oppressed, which uses theatre to bring about social and political change. Together with their friends, Li asks: ‘Which questions do we still need to ask together so we can acknowledge, co-navigate, and thus transform the inaccessibility of the here and now?’
At Prospects Li will present a performance in the shape of one-on-one conversations with the public. Through this, they seek to explore how ‘our bodies arrive, our languages unfold, and our assumptions take shape in this shared space’. Li also offers opportunities for online participation
Text: Milo Vermeire