Alt Text as Poetry
Alt Text as Poetry is a collaborative project of artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan. They aim to take the important web accessibility practice of alt-text (image descriptions that can be read by screen-readers) and approach it as a creative and poetic practice. They also offer a study club where you can read examples of others’ creative alt-text offerings.
Relaxed Performance
Relaxed Performance describes an approach that seeks to remove the physical, sensory, attitudinal, and financial barriers that would prevent people from attending or participating in cultural or artistic events like theatre and performance.
To learn more about this practice, check out the section on Relaxed Performance.
Quiet Parade
Artist Aislinn Thomas created Quiet Parade—a low-stimulation parade and celebration that embraces inclusion and accessibility as a way of creating new collective ways of assembling together.
Hidden
In 2020, artist Gloria C. Swain curated the exhibit Hidden at Tangled Art + Disability in Toronto. Hidden engages with themes of intergenerational trauma, ableism, and the experiences of Black artists with invisible disabilities. This exhibit centred experiences that are typically pushed to the periphery under the intersecting violences of ableism and anti-Black racism.
Importantly, when one artist was unable to fully engage in the exhibit, Swain did not remove them from the show. Instead, Swain included an empty plinth that symbolized the practice of “holding space” for that artist, and of drawing attention to the exclusionary impacts of colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, racism, and ableism. This was a way of making the show accessible to this artist.
Finding Language
Finding Language is a performance by Vanessa Dion Fletcher, a Potawatomi and Lenape neurodiverse artist, in which they explore the intersections between colonialism and their relationship to language.
Finding Language: A Word Scavenger Hunt (Dispatch) | Studies in Social Justice
Vibrafusion
VibrafusionLab is a media arts centre in London, Ontario that creates accessible methods of engaging with art and performance through the creation of multi-sensory technologies.
Difference and Movement
The Difference and Movement: The Youth Mobility Project was a partnership between a diverse group of disabled youth, researchers, and artists in Ontario. Together the team wanted to challenge how disability is seen as a deficit and explore the idea of disability as potential. This project advanced an affirmative way of thinking about differences through creative ‘mobility experiments’ with five youth partners who identified as disabled. Within the experiments, the team positioned creative mobilities as micro-activist becomings that suggest avenues for celebrating differences towards instigating radical change.
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