‘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]