Episode 2.0: Announcing Crip Ritual project - Show Notes and Transcript
Simple English summary:
In this episode, Aimi, Cassandra, and Jarah announce a new Critical Design Lab project: Crip Ritual. This project focuses on how disabled people use rituals to change daily life or broader structures.
Links:
Crip Ritual website: https://cripritual.com/
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Introduction Description:
The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with sounds of a wheelchair rhythmically banging down metal steps, the putter of an elevator arriving at a person’s level, and an elevator voice saying “Floor two, Floor three.” Voices begin to define Contra*. Layered voices say “Contra is friction…Contra is…Contra is nuanced…Contra is transgressive…Contra is good trouble…Contra is collaborative…Contra is a podcast!…Contra is a space for thinking about design critically…Contra is subversive…Contra is texture…”
An electric guitar plays a single note to blend out the sound.
The rhythmic beat of an electronic drum begins and fades into the podcast introduction.
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Aimi:
Hey Contra* audience, I'm here with two other members of the critical design lab and we have an exciting announcement to share with you.
Cassandra:
This is Cassandra.
Jarah:
And this is Jarah.
Aimi:
So on behalf of the Critical Design Lab, we are co-curating an exhibition called Crip Ritual, which will open in spring 2021. So Jarah, do you want to say a little bit about the idea of ritual and disability and how we've been thinking about these things coming together?
Jarah:
We were thinking about how disabled or sick, mad folks have our own actions. The premise of this show is that disabled crip, death, mad, and sick people face a lot of barriers and stigma. So one way that we deal with these barriers is through rituals. Rituals can be things that we do to create accessibility. They might mark important moments or they may be in community with others who have similar experiences. So perhaps they provide comfort. And I think some are private, some are daily, others are public or maybe are rare occurrences. But they're important to us and how we move through space-time. And so I think these, if they're not rituals already, these actions can become rituals. So they help to affirm us maybe our embodiments, our embodied selves, and speak to our lived experiences. So I guess crip ritual becomes a way for us to record maybe through art or audio or video to record or speak to our lived experiences.
Aimi:
Yeah.
Jarah:
Yeah.
Aimi:
Yeah. So we started talking about this by reading anthropological theories of how cultures have rituals and rituals are ways of kind of creating new realities and putting that into conversation with disability, culture and community.
Cassandra:
Actually, I was just talking to my students about this the other day because ritual can mean a lot of different things for different people and sometimes we tend to think of rituals as being really woo or extremely spiritual. But there are also ways that social scientists think about social ceremonies that mark some kind of change in status or create change as being rituals in the sort of sociological definition. And the higher power that you're appealing to may or may not be a God or a spiritual being, but it could be the state if you're asking for disability status or it could be a medical professional if you're asking for prescription to be renewed. As a lab, we've been thinking a lot about this idea of ritual and it's actually started some amazing conversations for us. So we want to extend that conversation to include our broader community.
Aimi:
Yeah, so some of the examples we were talking about or things like rituals of letting go of an assistive device that you've outgrown or rituals like Jarah was talking about of these kind of daily habits, things that we have to do over and over again. For example, negotiating access or dealing with our chronic pain. And also these things that are sort of like activism and magic, the crip magic of public disability protests like what folks are doing in the Bay area right now around the electricity being shut off. So the point of all of this is that as disabled people or crip, mad, deaf, or sick people, we often have these rituals that we turn to, they might be scripts or other things that we have to do over and over again to survive and thrive and get the world to support us.
Aimi:
You can participate in this project in two ways. First, by sharing your rituals via social media, using #cripritual and second, by submitting your work for the exhibition via our website at www.cripritual.com
Jarah:
On that website and also linked from the show notes for this episode, you can find a call for artists to propose work to be included in this exhibition. The call will be out and open all winter and we ask artists to submit proposals for art by March 1st, 2020.
Cassandra:
And the works that we choose for the exhibit will be shown at two art galleries in the city of Toronto. Tangled Art + Disability and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto-Scarborough from January through March 2021
Aimi:
Once again, you can participate in this project using the hashtag #cripritual on Instagram or Twitter and you can submit your artworks for consideration for the exhibition at our website, www.cripritual.com.
Outro:
You’ve been listening to Contra*: a podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. Learn more about our projects at mapping-access.com., and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
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