‘Anotherness’: A performance with Access Lab & Library
Acknowledgment and introduction by Jacquie
Acknowledgment and introduction by ALL
I’m [F/J] and this is [F/J] … (warm remarks)
On Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country, where we live, the traditional greeting is wominjeka. It means ‘come with purpose’. The purpose that orients us is to stand with First Peoples, with communities of people who’ve been organised into class, disability, racialisation and other identities in order to be managed or erased. To be accomplices in a real and actionable, material and psychological, political and cultural struggle against eugenics and genocide. It’s in this spirit that we pay our respects to traditional owners of this Country, the Yagera and Turrbal peoples, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
We recognise that for all of us in this place, our relationships to the settler-colonial project is unresolved.
We offer that our relationship to ableism and access is unresolved too, and that gathering together to feel through the frictions and implications and possibilities can be generative, socially, politically, and creatively.
Access describes a set of power relations that determine who participates, and how.
Access (and access needs) will intersect with everybody, whether they’re conscious of it or not — and whether or not they consider themselves disabled. Our approach to access recognises the knowledge and leadership of disabled people who have shaped more liberatory and radical understandings of access, including concepts like ‘access intimacy’ (Mia Mingus) and ‘access as a temporary, collectively-held space’ (Carmen Papalia).
We often describe access as an experimental field, and as a platform for generosity. We understand that access is ever-changing. Throughout our work, we are actively thinking about how access is framed, created and negotiated. We embrace an idea of abundant subjectivities, where all perspectives are welcome and relevant. We are also concerned with how access and consent are interrelated — interpersonally and collectively.
To return to purpose — access shouldn’t be hoarded. Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom. We are here — us, and hopefully you — to set access loose as an ungovernable refraction of needs and desires, reflecting the art, communities and lives we belong to.
[Flute cue]
Editorial introduction
Today’s event is not about presenting a model of access. Instead, this is an experimental publication in performance clothing.
It’s an inter-sensory publication, co-authored by a temporary collective of people curious about access-infused practice. We gathered only two days ago, within a workshop setting, to play with image description and captioning exercises couched in an improvisational, conversational, critical, poetic and disruptive spirit. Humbly, to try to unravel the ways that artworks can be described and redescribed.
We came to the workshop with complex relationships to access, and varied ways of knowing, stakes, and curiosities. Some brought specific questions with them:
- Felicity asked: How can we think of accessibility not as estrangement, as reinforcing otherness, but as a process of enfoldment that invites a collective experience, acknowledging different ways of knowing and being?
- Rae asked: How can we engage with modes of communication so that access is not about clarifying but about feeling - something that can shift between different senses, gaps, and mistaken translations? How can captioning and image description be used in a more porous way so they convey slippage, rhythm, embodied communication?
- Felix asked: To what degree can radical accessibility be decolonial?
The unseen exhibition
The University of Queensland Art Museum is, for the moment, a museum without a public building.
The exhibition spaces of the museum can only be remembered as they have been, or imagined, as they promise to be.
We are fortunate enough to exist in the blurriness of in-between.
What could it be, we wondered, to present an imaginary exhibition?
An exhibition that could only be known in the mind’s eye,
an exhibition that could only be known through redescription?
An exhibition unemcumbered
(Is the imagination subordinate to reality? Is reality subordinate to the imaginary?)
Re-calling The Rainbow Experience (2021)
By Mia Boe
acrylic on linen
canvas 76.0 x 102.0 x 3.5 cm
EVN and Logan, recalling the painting through a collaborative ekphrastic poem.
Between the painting and us
Access is relational.
It says something about our closeness to the subject, and our distance from the subject.
The painting The Rainbow Experience by Mia Boe deals with obscured stories from the artist’s family history, stories of settler colonial violence.
One of the figures in the painting represents Mia Boe’s great-great-grand uncle Wonamutta, an Aboriginal trooper.
The troopers were forced by colonial officers to enact violence against their own people.
Mia Boe signals this by painting her great-great-grand uncle blindfolded.
What is it to meet this painting, with its brightly painted figures and sky, without this cultural context?
How can bodies process what has been seen?
As more context beyond the frame is learned, how can we process shifting impressions?
How can we handle our closeness or distance to the subject of the painting?
How can our bodies feel through similarities or differences in positionality between us and the artist?
How can our bodies process responsibility?
Through improvised choreography, Clare shares the ways their bodies are:
- processing the imagery of the painting, and
- processing the difference between their positionality and the artist.
As Clare processes their impressions, we invite you to join us in a collective audiodescription.
We encourage you to describe their movements, thinking of these questions:
- What was your eye drawn to first?
- And while your attention was there, what was overlooked?
Fayen moves around the room with a wireless microphone — have workshop participants primed to contribute, and offer to others who signal interest.
Imagining access to Other (2010)
Other 2010
Tracey Moffatt 1960 -
Gary Hillberg (Editor) 1982 -
Single-channel digital video, 7:00 min, edition 30/200
Collection of The University of Queensland
Absolute position
I’m not sure where I am, or what year it’s supposed to be, but I come to you live, hovering above a polished marble floor. I’ve heard that Indian marble is even better than Italian, duller and less veined or something, so maybe this is Indian marble below me, dark grey rectangles set into dull emerald. It doesn’t matter. What matters is I don’t recognise this place, and my eye is trying to make sense of the arched columns, the clustered lamps shining off the marble, and of course the dozens of important looking people dressed in crisp, colourful gowns and tunics made of fine fabrics. Even the people holding trays are dressed fancy.
It is unquestionably strange that I am floating above all of them, maybe three times higher than my eyes are used to being. But something stranger happens. I glide down into the room, and within a couple of seconds, I find my eyes at chest height. None of the dressed up people look at me because we are all staring at a large group of black and brown women. They’re draped in golden bits and pieces, and they’re all dancing in synch, and you can tell they do this a lot, because they are moving very much Together and they all look like aerobics instructors. I’m thinking, what’s the word for aerobics in their language? Or languages? Except they’re wearing all the gold, including these kind of gold chain underpants, and huge arrangements of lush brown feathers on their heads.
They twirl and jiggle and smile and swing and something tells me I should recognise that they are Natives. So exotic; although ironically, the thesaurus says exotic is ‘non-native’. What I am seeing is groupness … do we go so far as to say tribal here? — and I notice my cheeks flushing with sentiments about the beauty of their culture and the simple sophistication of their customs and craft and make-up artists. Nostalgia is a longing for a past that never existed, and yet I forget that only a moment ago, I was actually floating above this room; heck, I didn’t have a body!
I was floating above the marble floor, and there was action. There were performers and onlookers, and a room so noisy with the messages of its materials and their shapes and arrangements. I gave it to you as Vision without the encumberance of embodiment. I’ve heard it called a ‘God’s eye view’. I gave you my world! I gave you your world.
And — in Tracey Moffatt’s Other — it’s only 18 seconds that we’re here, then the Vision moves on and someone else’s eye plays God’s eye. But it’s this rush of Hollywood World Views that bestows or shapes the imaginary of our minds, connects ideas to images, triangulates sense. Other is knowing and not knowing amplified. As it swings from scene to scene, how does Moffatt produce a subtext of grief or absurdity? Who do you identify, or identify with, in this picture? Or that one? How about for Tracey Moffatt?
We can feel our closeness or distance to the montage and to the scenes within it. Do you recognise this scene? Do you remember the action, unseen here, that nourishes it with a world of meanings? Do you remember a public response, or cultural meaning of those scenes? But through the auteur’s supercut, we are also witnessing Moffatt’s relationship to the films, so I suppose we’re then also witnessing our relationship to Moffatt’s relationship to the films.
And: can access be legal? We ponder whether, in making media that coopts copyrighted media, we are risking a breach of copyright. Are we critiquing, reviewing, parodying or satirising with our descriptions, or researching or studying Moffatt’s? Is this fair dealing? Is this fair? What are the layers of permission?
What are the layers of permission?
(Fayen) Some imagined possibilities for access
Boom boom bang bang
Eyes widening, approaches, touches, intimacy bursts
unveiling
Exoticism, Orientalism, Fetishisation
Panting, trumpeting, rhythmic music, slowly building,
tension, pulsing, handclaps
a dance extravaganza,
intensity building
explosions literally, metaphorically, musically and visually
a crescendo, rapid fire
words fail at a certain point, the pace is overwhelming at a certain point
Could we have layers of voices?
The artist’s voice, the artist’s intent, a critique of the artist’s intent
And/or
The colonial gaze
And/or
The names of the films from which each encounter between others is sampled,
“Hurricane (1979): A desperate love affair between a young Samoan chief, played by Dayton Ka'ne, and an American painter, played by Mia Farrow, who defies the will of her father. Amid this man-made tension comes a hurricane so devastating, the lives of the lovers and the entire island are imperiled.”
And/or
A person experiencing the work for the first time.
But who could this be? Whose voices are welcome?
Can a child’s impressions provide a layer, or is that excluded, given the moments of horniness as the film climaxes?
Who decides whose descriptions are allowed?
What about incorporating a jumbled layer of intrusive thoughts?
Do we give the audience a primer to help prepare them for our different voices?
Would it be like a choose-your-own-adventure?
Would we disperse among the crowd, speak simultaneously, from the corners of the room?
---
What simple, performative gestures might honour the spirit of the theatricality of the staged encounters?
Could we film something together? How could we honour the satire? How could we honour the overwhelm?
Rae tries Directing the Other …
[Video: Directing the Other]
Re-calling Other (2010)
Share this script:
[Four describers - Nabil, Felix, Felicity and Timothy - are dispersed among different PAs inside and outside the space. Timothy stands somewhere in proximity to some of the audience.]
Nabil: “Closer!”
Felix: “Look!”
Felicity: “I see you.”
Timothy: “I feel you.”
Nabil: “Who is she?”
Felix: “Are you – my other?”
Felicity: “Who is she?”
Timothy: “Are you – mine?”
[Concurrently, an overlapping chorus:]
“Is to touch to take?”
“Anotherness, anotherness, anotherness...”
[Fayen borrow’s mic from Felix]
Could our percussive bodies be a tool for vocalising our impressions?
Could our breath offer a tool for vocalising our impressions,
for conveying absurdity, or awkwardness,
to share what it feels like to tune our bodies individually and collectively to the work?
[Play breath sound work/ captioned video]
[Alone in the centre, Timothy begins the body percussiveness score in one place.]
[Timothy walks outside to microphone.]
[Other (2010) continues beyond breath — ]
The 4 describers begin to describe from different perspectives.
Sometimes overlapping, and sometimes the describers create space for single voices to be heard.
Felix: physical describer of people’s movement and proximity.
Nabil: emotional vibe check of the scene, and self-vibe-check
Felicity: environmental description of setting, weather
Timothy: describer of sound and sound effects
When the film finishes, all describers become still, and sit down/rest.
Closing
Jon:
During the early years of the colonial project to construct first the colonies, then the nation-state of so-called australia, settler administrators established a network of galleries, libraries, museums, botanic gardens, and zoos. They considered these institutions important, a priority to model protocols of civilised behaviour.
After all, then as now, the mind is the frontier.
The colonial authorities set out to encourage the public to devote leisure time to absorbing and therefore reproducing these codes of acceptable behaviour. They recognised how important it was that the public chose this willingly. It was the difference between installing and multiplying their ideals of aesthetic and technical excellence – ideals that would produce and reproduce people who would contribute to the settler colony’s cultural and economic development.
In museums of art, these protocols restricted touch to approved professionals. They encouraged quiet and demure appreciation of artworks, with bodies held at bay.
Fayen:
The concept of the model citizen emerged in a ‘rat king’ tangle with eugenics logic. Legacies of discrimination were spun up and set in motion, ritualising then automating the dehumanisation of bodies that did not conform.
In this place, and in the next place, what imagination do we have for a museum of art that embraces ways of being and doing and gathering — against the protocols of the civilised body?
Can that imagination become a counter-protocol?
We ask, and wait, and ask again —
to and at and across a museum
or a practise
or a house
that embraces learning from one another.
That lingers in the attempt, or in the possibilities
that form in the slipperiness of translation,
in the always-partial perspective, multiplied,
ankle or waist or neck deep
in the joyful, unruly messiness of
the collective.
Of anotherness.