How hard it is to get connected if you …

Behinderung und Kunst, im Hier und Jetzt, genau jetztThis is a rant again, I am not sure if I need to apologize for ranting so often, but just recently I read this statement about ‘disability rage’ and maybe, yes, maybe it simply is inevitable to feel rage about a lot of good will and how stifled all our anti-ableist endeavours in society may sometime turn out to be.

Why can help be stifling, in particular in this one field we currently have this feeling of un-immediateness and being stifled: talking about creativity and arts.

It seems like for overcoming ableism as an artist you have to enter the virtual and organized disability arts world. It’s not their fault.

It’s just > as long as you have to severely fight with ableism, you just do get swallowed up still by these organizations that fit into the hapless > institutional model of ableism: you end up in contexts that seem patronizing, i.e. in (very explicitly) able-bodied lead art groups and stuff.

How do you make the jump out of these contexts? Our situation is for instance that a > disabled personal assistant, who happens to be an artist themselves, is trying to support > an artist with a disability which is falsely still categorized as a cognitive impairment. But this only because the syndrome we talk about here involves speech and language “impairment” – and differences in movement. We get a double layer of discrimination-levels here.

Using AAC plus Multimodal Communication and having a speech assistant who is not properly installed as such, where other involved assistants that have to be ‘being relied upon’ themselves do have ableist views on the person with a speaking-disability, communication rights to combat ableism is a huge thing, and we run without hardly support.

You may be able to see that this is a real difficult situation that we face. I better end at this point, feeling like a small boat in a huge shaky ocean … . The difficult thing is pressing on, living with frustrations, not giving up but also not making any harmful hurtful wrong “compromises”.

rev. 26.12.24