Introduction

Intro to TOD

The project ‘Through Our Dialogue (TOD)’, and the publication you are holding in your hands, have been becoming for a long time. We, the TOD members compiled of a group of young artists and art workers, set out to make a tool, that could support art institutions in developing into more accessible places to both collaborators and audiences with disabilities. Our tool is a result of many hours of sharing, not-knowing, trusting, discussing, failing, arguing, laughing and dreaming together.

Disability works as a way of knowing as well as a position of knowledge. It asks how knowledge is shaped by ableist standards that prioritise certain bodies and minds over others. These standards are reflected in the ways society is organised through power structures and institutional practices. From this perspective, disability becomes a critical lens for questioning, expanding, and reimagining what we understand as knowledge. It offers a way of approaching, interpreting, and reshaping the world towards more sustainable futures for both disabled people and those who are not yet disabled.

The tool we have designed, as both a physical publication and a digital resource, responds to different moments of capacity, need, and preference. They move between languages, styles, and formats, balancing open-ended exploration with attempts at definition. Throughout the process, we have aimed to approach our content with generosity while also making the tool itself accessible. We have made space for complexity, welcoming contradictions and different ways of engaging, and allowing multiple truths to exist alongside one another.

The pages are collages of quotes, conversations, essays, lists, art works, among others, that together hold many access points. We have prioritised writing in short text formats that offers clarifying text with summarised key points alongside softer, more extended texts. Most of our writing follows the different combinations of guidelines in our plain language guide, which you can find in this publication.

Our tool is co-written by the many voices of TOD, with the intention of offering different reading routes through the publication and encouraging non-linear reading. We invite readers to jump between chapters, pair different parts with each other, and connect to an intuitive way of navigating.

‘This Could be a Beginning’ is an incomplete, imperfect, relational, adoptable and adaptable orienteering guide to support your next steps in becoming a more accessible art institution. We have made it in the friction and intimacy of being different together, rather than striving for an agreement on something absolute. It is an insistence on the process of building more accessible spaces, and the process itself as an ethic, an “aliveness” of being together otherwise.

Happy reading…

Why Am I Part of TOD?

“I wanted to have conversations with other disabled that we could then bring to the people who create the art spaces we often want to be part of, but instead feel alienated from.” 

”Let me first tell you how difficult it is for me to talk openly about this question. Here I am, trying to discuss something I so often try to hide or neglect in my professional life. You see, my job as a freelance cultural worker is largely based on making things work. Not complaining. Not being difficult. Not asking for additional resources in an already struggling system. Just make it work. The difficulty arises when your body decides not to work with you. This was the starting point for me joining TOD. After many years of my body becoming an increasingly uncooperative colleague, I became convinced that something was wrong with the way institutions view disabilities. I came from a place of feeling alone, but also suspecting I wasn’t. And so, after bending, reaching, and squeezing myself into disabling conditions, I felt something needed to change. For me, TOD was the beginning of something else…” 

“I am part of TOD because I wish to contribute to a broader understanding of and deeper empathy with people with diverse physical and cognitive abilities, resources and needs. And our coping, when it comes to levels of accessibility in artworks and art institutions, as well as in life.  In my perspective, art institutions in DK and worldwide, are in their infant-/pre-blooming phase of the vast potential for inspiration, inclusivity and common, future diverse equality. I wish to help push, birth, investigate and activate this potential and root it into curiosity and everyday changes. I want other disabled artists and those with artistic dreams to see themselves and not have to jump through a million extra hoops that are in our way because of the industry’s ignorance and systematic oppression.” 

“Because when disabled people come together to think, magic happens.”  

“I wanted to learn from others’ dreams and experiences, share knowledge generated from a disabled perspective, and develop strategies for addressing the ableism of inaccessible art institutions, within a broader framework (as a kind of a background for my thinking) of a rooted planetary dependency.”

“I’m part of TOD because my own experience of developing and working with an Access Rider has shown me how important it is to make access needs visible and negotiable within cultural institutions. I’m interested in taking this experience further: developing practical tools that go beyond individual access and can be shared, adapted and used by other artists. For me, TOD is a way of turning personal access knowledge into collective knowledge and practice.” 

“The importance of making people who have trouble stating their needs to institutions and society has become more important to me after I was diagnosed with schizophrenia myself. It became apparent to me that while my diagnosis didn’t affect me a lot personally in society, it does affect most people with the diagnosis. It’s hard enough to stand up to people with authority as a non-disabled person. Therefore, I wanted to make a change and make art institutions more accommodating.”

“For me, accessibility is about both the people who create art and those who encounter it. Whether it is in a library or a museum, we have a collective responsibility as soon as we receive funding to make the experience accessible. Accessibility begins by creating good working conditions from within by creating an environment where we dare to take on challenges and enter into collaborations across different areas of knowledge and experience. From there we can together strive to create the best possible conditions. Artworks can contain a utopia and a creative vision. In the same way, creating accessibility is a creative task, where necessity can become an opportunity to benefit as many people as possible. TOD has given me an expanded network and strengthened my belief that we are moving in the right direction.”

– TOD members

Wording and Translation 

Language in contemporary accessibility work is in constant development. This fact can derail actual encounters where understanding is fostered. For this reason, we find it relevant to strengthen the culture of being curious and asking questions. A culture that might heal the tendency to walk on eggshells with each other.

This tool has been developed by a group primarily exchanging in English, making the project and process as open and fluent to as many as possible, also counting the reader. The group has been discussing issues related to translation between languages and in that process found it essential to settle on some terms that we have chosen to use in this specific tool.

We are aware that this choice narrows down a vast field of wording and intentions, but it is done with the ambition of leaving the reader with clarity on and empathy for everyday use of words: Meaning that our wording should not always be fully correct nor academic, but it should make everyone feel safe and curious to learn more. We are using the term disabled/disability throughout the tool with the awareness that more nuanced wording is predominant in multiple other contexts. We are doing this to ensure inclusivity to the largest degree possible in these early stages of contemporary accessibility work. 

Everyday Reality, Barriers, and Structures for Disabled People 

Conversations about disability and access in arts and culture often begin with questions of representation, inclusion, or accessibility. While these matters are essential, they cannot be separated from the conditions that shape disabled people’s lives. Access to cultural spaces is inseparable from access to housing, income, healthcare, personal assistance, mobility, and the right to live a safe and fulfilling life in both private and public. Across the Nordic countries, disabled people continue to experience structural barriers that limit not only participation in the arts but participation in society itself.

The following reflections insist that disability justice must extend beyond art institutions and address the political, economic, and social systems that determine whose lives are supported and whose are made precarious:

“I think we need to address the structures that deny people with disabilities, what is considered, basic living needs. These are embodied in structural racism, the cash benefit reform, the right to have savings, cuts to early retirement (especially for young people), and the debate about assisted suicide for the disabled. These are things that are important for us to include as they reflect a lived reality for crips right now. Most people with disabilities currently live in such miserable conditions that even basic needs are not met. If you don’t have, for example, money for food, someone to help you get to the toilet or are so mentally ill that you can’t go outside, it doesn’t help much that art is accessible when it comes to creating a space for the disabled in arts and culture.”

– TOD member

“As a visually impaired person living in Sweden, it is almost impossible to get the right to have assistance. This makes it harder to do anything spontaneously or plan your everyday life. How to go somewhere if you haven’t memorised the route and have been there multiple times before. If construction is happening on the memorised route or someone has parked their bicycle where it shouldn’t, anxiety and disorientation kicks in. Everything being digitalised and not having real life contact with customer service also stops a lot of people from being able to, for example, buy tickets for cultural events etc.”

– TOD member

“When attempting to respond and add a perspective, I find I can only think and write from a position of overwhelm. I too don’t think of access to arts as neutral, nor all kinds of inclusion in the arts as inherently good. For one thing, it doesn’t always help, but beyond that, what appears as access is often weaponised against disabled people in ways that blocks our/their possibility of being an equal citizen with equal mobility in the world. When artistic practice operates within and alongside disabling structures, it likes to present itself as a care practice. An example of this would be someone who initiates a social project within the sphere of the psychiatric system and bureaucratic system of a municipality without any wishes of changing these. This may offer an activity, a place to be, and a group to socialise with. This may be a genuine attempt to help. But without consideration of the broader social structure and political ideology behind this, this practice becomes a management method, which essentially blocks access. Art becomes one more secluded, metaphorically fenced, arena where disabled people are allowed to be. And I’m not the first person who wants to be everywhere, and for disabled people to be everywhere in the world.”

– TOD member

Who is Not Here? 

We are a group of young disabled artists and art workers who have created this tool. The processes behind its making reflect our multiple perspectives, shaped by our lived experiences, including the problems of how disabled people are represented within the cultural fields and in wider society. These problems involve both misrepresentation and absence, especially when it comes to intersectional representation of disability. The barriers that racialized, elderly, migrant, queer, transgender, and economically disadvantaged people face are further disabling and othering. 

Within our presence, our identities, there are voids of representation too. This void requires a consistent continuation of providing the opportunities for disabled people to let themselves be known on their/our own terms and ownership of knowledge and meaning making.

Firstly, because no singular person can represent a full picture of specific disability/s or identity/s. There is no ticking of a box possible, alongside no desire for fixed categories. 

Secondly, we always run out of time. Even in slow formats, we run out of time, because there is too much to say when we finally have the space to speak. And sometimes, we are not ready to say everything that we want to say. And sometimes, we need time to discover what we want and how we want to speak about it. Speaking and being heard, it is a confrontation with incompleteness. So, within our presence, within our possibilities, the question becomes: How do we negotiate and nourish our conditions for keeping trying? This work is never fully done.

We find it important to be transparent about the voices, that we do not personally represent. Any tool made by a group of people with disabilities will be necessarily limited by the perspectives, that we inevitably do not share, since no one is able to gather all groups of disabled people in a single project and that even two people belonging to the same group, can have very varying access needs. Here are some of the categories, that we do not have personally represented in the TOD group:

– People who have no access to healthcare
– d/Deaf people
– Non-speaking people who are dependent on speech-supporting and generating technologies
– People with speech impediments and impairments
– People with Tourette syndrome, vocal and motor tics
– Little people/People with dwarfism
– People with limb differences
– People with Down syndrome
– People with higher cognitive support needs
– People who are in bed, who can not leave their home or hospital room
– People who are terminally ill
– Undiagnosed, not-yet diagnosed, and self-diagnosed people