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?