Contra* Podcast Episode 2.3: Contra*Fashion with Sky Cubacub

Episode 2.3: Contra*Fashion with Sky Cubacub- Show Notes and Transcript 

Simple English summary: 

What is "queercrip fashion?" In this episode of Contra*, I talk to Sky Cubacub, a fashion designer known for their colorful lycra, mesh, and chain mail designs. We discuss Sky's Rebirth Garments  and Radical Visibility projects, as well as how specific materials shape their approach to design. And I talk a bit about my own sewing practice. 

Themes:

  • Queercrip fashion 

  • Accessibility as creative force

  • Disability Visibility

  • Clothing as armour and self-expression

  • Audio description

Links: 

People, Art, and Places Referenced: 

Definitions:

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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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Episode Introduction: 

Welcome to Contra*: the podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing. 

I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie .  I am a professor at Vanderbilt University, a designer and design researcher, and the director of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institution collaborative focused on disability, technology, and critical theory.  Members of the lab collaborate on a number of projects focused on hacking ableism, speaking back to inaccessible public infrastructures, and redesigning the methods of participatory design—all using a disability culture framework. This podcast provides a window into the kinds of discussions we have within the lab, as well as the conversations we are interested in putting into motion. So in coming episodes, you’ll also hear from myself and the other designers and researchers in the lab, and we encourage you to get in touch with us via our website, www.mapping-access.com or on Twitter at @criticaldesignl 

What is "queercrip fashion?" In this episode of Contra*, I talk to Sky Cupacub, a disability fashion designer known for their colorful lycra, mesh, and chainmaille designs. We discuss Sky's Rebirth Garment and Radical Visibility projects, as well as how specific materials shape their approach to design. And I talk a bit about my own sewing practice. 

Interview Transcript: 

Aimi Hamraie:

Welcome to Sky Cubacub, who is here today to talk to us about Rebirth Garments. I'm so excited to be talking to you. We've been in touch for a few months around the work that you've been doing on queercrip fashion and other things, so. And I'm especially excited to talk to you about fashion, because that is a realm that this podcast hasn't gotten into yet, so welcome.

Sky Cubacub:

Oh, awesome, that's exciting then. Thank you for having me.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah. Maybe to get started. So I'm just really interested in what's happening on the screen right now. So can you tell us a little bit about the space that you're in?

Sky Cubacub:

So, right now I have three other people in this space with me. I moved the puppy so you wouldn't hear her barking. But okay, so I guess over here, I have my collaborator Vogds.

Jake Vogds:

Hi.

Sky Cubacub:

And over in the back my collaborator Compton.

Compton:

Hello.

Sky Cubacub:

We have a meeting today about our second collection for the Radical Visibility Collective, and that I can show you a zine from that. It's a collection of both... [inaudible 00:01:18], thanks. Both clothing and also music, where all of the lyrics are audio descriptions of all of the outfits. So this zine that I have here is basically like a glorified lyrics book. Each model has a spread, and we have me here and it says pink three-quarter turtleneck crop, circular cutout on the chest, don't stop, dripping with metal mail chains on the hip, shoulder shimmy, shake, shake, dip.

Aimi Hamraie:

Nice.

Sky Cubacub:

So we're working on the second one. Vogds is the music director, Compton and Vogds and I are all doing the designing of the clothing together and making the clothing. So we're pretty excited about that. And then over here I have my new intern Diane, they just started today. So I'm giving them things to cut out and that's what I am kind of playing with right now on the screen. You can see me taping stuff together and then I'll hand them this pattern for like a singlet. And I'll have them cut out the trims and things like that, because we're actually doing an impromptu photo shoot today. I decided yesterday to do this photo shoot. And I'm trying to just make it really clear that I make swimwear, because a lot of the clothing that I do can double as swimwear.

Sky Cubacub:

But I think that people, because they see me being like, "Oh this is lingerie, this is dance wear, this is swimwear, this is different kinds of active wear." Then it's like so many things going on and I'm just trying to make it very understandable. So I'm doing kind of these Rebirth basics that are not as heavily color blocked, which means like using a bunch of different colors. Just doing like the most simplified versions of all the outfits that are still radically visible. They're still very pattern and colorful, but just a little bit more simple to understand.

Aimi Hamraie:

Cool. So is this your studio then?

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah, this is my studio.

Aimi Hamraie:

Very exciting. I mean there's not going to be a video of this podcast, but what we're looking at is tons of really brightly colored garments and stacks of fabrics and materials and things like that, it's really exciting. I really love the aesthetic of sewing and I think I mentioned to you in the email that I sent earlier this week, that the way that I got into studying design was actually through fashion and hacking fashion.

Sky Cubacub:

Oh nice, yeah.

Aimi Hamraie:

That's a big part of my life and there's actually a room in my house that's all this sewing art, and then also where I do my sewing and stuff. So I'm excited to talk with you about where you've been taking this and kind of like why fashion matters and things like that. Because in some ways in my experience, fashion is actually really close to architecture.

Sky Cubacub:

Totally.

Aimi Hamraie:

And [crosstalk 00:05:02] relationships. Even the drafting is very similar.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah, completely.

Aimi Hamraie:

But then of course there are differences in terms of like the materials and the individualization of fashion and stuff. So to get us started, why don't you just tell us a little bit about, first of all, kind of what Rebirth Garments is as a project and how you got to working on it.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. So Rebirth Garments is not just a clothing line, but I guess it's all kind of under the guise of a clothing line, but it's also educating folks. I have the Radical Visibility zine, which the first issue is my manifesto. Will you hand me the manifesto zine? And yeah, it has a nice picture of me on the cover with Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project and my friend Nina Litoff. We're all modeling outside of Alice's house in San Francisco and wearing very brightly colored clothing and chain mail and some knit stuff. And yeah, the manifesto is all about this queercrip dress reform movement, and claiming our bodies, really putting ourselves out there, taking up space, taking a visual space and refusing to be ignored.

Sky Cubacub:

So I think that that's kind of the main part of the clothing line, and then making the actual clothing is like slightly secondary, I would say. It's more about trying to promote people to be more radically visible, if they feel safe doing it. But like pushing the envelope in spaces that you feel safe so that it can help kind of change people's minds about what dressing is and the power of clothing and yeah, I guess just being stareable in different ways.

Aimi Hamraie:

And I think that your work is such a good example of how an argument or set of ideas can be translated into the materiality of something. And so I wonder if you could just describe your aesthetic a little bit for people who haven't encountered it before.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah, so everything that I do is pretty much all spandex. I chose the material spandex because it is my favorite material to work with, but also because the stretchiness allows for more body fluctuation type things. I'll do other stretch fabric things, too, if people need cotton if they have different sensitivities. But yeah, so I generally use spandex and it's all very bright colors and I use lots of geometric patterns. Coming back to architecture, I was very inspired by the architect, Buckminster Fuller. His houses were both very functional, but also had kind of like a space ... it was completely futurey space aesthetic that didn't fit in with anything else at the time. His Dymaxion car was a car he invented when all the other cars are Model T's, and it just looked like a rocket.

Sky Cubacub:

It looks so wild when you see them next to each other. So I guess I am definitely inspired by that idea and yeah, this idea of queercrip futurism. And yeah, kind of looking like aliens, kind of looking like superheroes, being very... But still rejecting the idea of having to be a Super Crip in order to be valued. But yeah, for me I need to kind of dress up and look like a superhero to feel like I have the confidence or just to be able to go outside and have the world see me, I need to put on my armor, my literal chain mail armor and my soft spandex armor in order to feel strong.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, I was remembering that in your manifesto there's this whole part about the chain mail where you talk about how making the chain mail has actually altered your body. I think that's so interesting. Can you just tell us a little bit, first of all, for people who don't know what chain mail is could you just describe it and then tell us about what it means to make it.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. So chain mail is a process involving two pairs of flat nose pliers that are special ones for chain mail. And using those to open and close hundreds and thousands and zillions of little tiny rings called jump rings. And those are made using wire of different materials. I mainly use aluminum, but you can use stainless steel, you can use Sterling silver, you can use much more expensive metals. And you link them together in different patterns that are called weaves. So the most iconic chain mail weave is a weave called European 4-in-1, and it's this mesh weave that they used in European armor, but there is chain mail from all different places in the world. So there's families of European weaves, there's families of Japanese weaves, there's Persian weaves, there's even Filipino chain mail. Which I'm Filipino, so I get very excited looking at that stuff.

Aimi Hamraie:

That's cool. I definitely want to look that up. I'm Persian, so [crosstalk 00:11:44] see what the Persian weave looks like.

Sky Cubacub:

Oh I love the Persian weave so much. I use them for my chain mail out of chain mail. It's good for, yeah, making rings, because there's a weave that's very round and then there's ones that are like kind of rectangular shaped and then there's ones that are like half circle shape. So they I think have maybe the most interesting structures.

Aimi Hamraie:

It kind of reminds me of like if you could knit with wire. [crosstalk 00:12:19].

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. It's very similar.

Aimi Hamraie:

And so this is something that, as you mentioned, was used it actual like battle armor and then you have used it in fashion and it's sort of integrated with these spandex garments that you make. Is that right?

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. I almost always am wearing a scale mail, which is like a cousin of chain mail, where instead of some rings it's like a little metal scale. It's like kind of a plate armor idea. So it's like something that ... chain mail is not a good defense against arrows or stabbing blows. It's better for like blunt slashing, but scale mail is a little bit more protective in other ways, because it's like little tiny plates that overlap. But yeah, so I wear this stuff because I used to be like, grabbed a lot on the street as a young teenager, as a person who is pretty small and reads as a girl, and also I'm Asian. So people just really liked to mess around with me a lot when I was a teen and it was very disheartening. So I started wearing these like metal headpieces and makeup that looked like tattoos and that became a huge defense for me so that people wouldn't mess with me, physically.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah. What this is like bringing up for me is, Alice Wong who you mentioned before who modeled for you, wrote this story about disabled people surviving the apocalypse and showing other people how to do that. And I feel like you're literally helping us figure out how to adorn ourselves in the apocalypse. [inaudible 00:14:27] apocalypses that are happening right now by a kind of like creating armor that is also estheticized and makes some sort of argument. And I'm also so struck by, so probably you do this too, but I spend a lot of time thinking about draping and the way that different materials drape. And there's such a distinct difference between a knit and a weave, and it seems like chain mail also kind of takes us into this whole other place and there are all these metaphors too, right? Like the weave is this straight grid and the net and the chain mail are these kinds of like entangled meshes. Do you think that that says something about queercrip culture, too?

Sky Cubacub:

Definitely. I think I wrote a paper in my sophomore year of college about how I think that chain mail represents community. It also represents polyamory. It also represents being trans. I mean it was like kind of cheesy, this paper that that I wrote, because it was like, "Oh, chain mail is both like being penetrated and penetrating at the same time." It only works if all of the rings are working together. I just think of it as a metaphor for our community.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah. That's really interesting. I feel like there's so many places to take that and kind of explore as you said, like the meetings of the different types of, what are the patterns called again?

Sky Cubacub:

Weaves.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, that's brilliant. I love that. So let's talk a little bit about kind of like making and designing for disability culture and queercrip disability culture.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah, I mean, my clothing is centered on queer and disabled folks of every size and every age and any background or culture. So the whole line is made by me. I'm queer, I'm non-binary, I'm Filipinex, I'm a Hapa so I'm half white, half Philippine. I have had like lifelong psychological disabilities, anxiety, panic disorder, depression. That really shaped most of my childhood basically up until I graduated from college. That affected me a lot. Once I was able to run my own company and do it on my own time and recognizing how my brain works ... I mean it's definitely noticeable, but it doesn't affect me in the way that it did when I had to follow other people's structures. And in college I had this kind of sudden stomach disorder thing happen that doctors still can't really figure out what is going on, but I have that kind of managed. I started the clothing line right after my stomach disorder kind of started, but like chilled out a little bit.

Sky Cubacub:

When it first started I couldn't eat at all. But yeah, making clothing where I was recognizing wanting to have a chest binder and wanting to have packing undies, but like also wanting the waistbands to be really, really soft so that it wouldn't hurt my stomach. Or having the seams on the outside, because I also have like sensory sensitivities that kind of go in and out of being very noticeable. And then a lot of my clothing, since the seams are pretty soft, I can actually wear it with the seams on the inside. But when I was younger I needed to have a lot of seams on the outside, and just wore all of my underwear and socks inside out until I was like in college. But yeah, so I wanted to make something that was for my community, for my friends. So, that's what I focus on.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, that's great. It's really striking the way that your focus reflects a set of political commitments that may also reflect actual people in your community and your own identities. But just as easily, it could be different, like the idea that it's not just accessible clothing, it's radically visible clothing that is also accessible for disabled people and for queer people and for fat people and people with the intersections of all of those things. That reflects also the kind of emerging idea of disability justice.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah, totally.

Aimi Hamraie:

The way that we talk about intersectionality in relation to disability, like in a sense of people of color who are artists who are disabled leading the movement and stuff around that. So you're kind of giving us these really tangible things to look at or to interact with and touch and where we can say, "This is actually what disability justice is like." It's clothes, and it's not an abstract concept. Here's what it's like.

Sky Cubacub:

Wow, that's so nice to hear.

Aimi Hamraie:

[inaudible 00:20:49] And I think it's part of, and you acknowledge this I think in your work in a lot of different ways, but visibility is an important way of making legible, both for our own communities and for other people, the kinds of futures they're imagining.

Sky Cubacub:

Totally.

Aimi Hamraie:

And then you have this cool thing about the image descriptions, which I really want us to talk about. That visibility isn't just about like what happens with-

Sky Cubacub:

Visually. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think Alice Wong wrote a sentiment that I really believe in. When I first discovered the Disability Visibility Project, they had a little disclaimer being like, "Oh, we're not centering only seeing people, we're just using the word visibility as like ..." Yeah, when I started the clothing line I was thinking about like radical textures, so I've been meaning to write more about that, diving deeper into what radical disability means for non-sighted folks.

Aimi Hamraie:

Texture I think is a really helpful concept. Like for whatever sensory reason I think a lot in textures and when I think about disability activism, there's actually a chapter in my book that's about if activism had a texture and what the the different textures would be.

Sky Cubacub:

I love that.

Aimi Hamraie:

Liberalism is like smooth, right? It's like everyone belongs and we're all the same. But queercrip culture is smashing sidewalks with sledgehammers and creating raised bumps and mixing paint with glitter and cat litter creating grittiness on a ramp. And things like that. And so I feel like texture metaphors are a really good way also of interfacing with blind culture, because there is so much hapticity, not just in braille but in the sort of art that is designed to be touched and things like that. So I think that's something that you're giving us some vocabulary around, too. It's really [crosstalk 00:23:20].

Sky Cubacub:

Cool, I'm glad.

Aimi Hamraie:

So I saw a video of a performance that you were doing that was related to the audio description. Could you say a little bit about that?

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. Was it the Radical Visibility Collective performance?

Aimi Hamraie:

I must have been, I think I saw it on Instagram or something, but it was like a dance performance and it involved, I think, clothes that you had made and then the soundtrack was-

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah, yeah. That's it.

Aimi Hamraie:

The text from the zine you were reading earlier. Could you tell us a little bit about that event and the project?

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. So I guess I did a show at the Whitney museum like the November before that show. That show was in March, 2018, and I did this show at the Whitney museum. Usually when I would do lectures I would go and do like audio descriptions right after, if it was like a lecture plus a performance. But at the Whitney museum I was doing a performance and a lecture and a workshop all smooshed into like an hour or an hour and a half and it was like so fast. So I didn't really get to do audio descriptions for every outfit. And then afterwards the partner of the person who curated me for that came up to me and was like, "Oh, it'd be great if it was at the same time."

Sky Cubacub:

But I have kind of sensory overload things happen for me if there's audio description that's going on at the same time as music. If there's like music with lyrics and then also an audio describer, my brain I think would freak out. So I had been talking to my collaborator Jake Vogds and earlier in the year they were like, "Oh I really want to make some songs based off of the manifesto." So right after that show at the Whitney I was like, "Oh what if we did an album where the songs were all audio descriptions." And making sure that all of the models described themselves or they told us exactly how they want it to be described, and then Jake would like take little bits of them and then make them rhyme.

Sky Cubacub:

So they might not use the whole description, but they'd be taking the elements and then and also how the model's danced, because all the audio describers that I have met have always been like, "Dance is the hardest thing to audio describe because there's so many things going on." So trying to decide what to focus on, instead we just asked the models, describe the way that you danced. And I think that definitely is representing them in a way that I think a lot of times I've seen audio describers or I've heard like old white men audio describers be like, "Oh, I want to make it known that this person is gender bending," or they'll have weird ways to try to describe a trans person and then I'm like, "Oh my God, you're not using any of the correct language around this." And I just get horrified.

Sky Cubacub:

Then making sure the models are totally in charge of how they wanted to be described. Because that's what I had told this audio describer when they were trying to ask me how to talk about trans identities. I was like, "Just ask the person you're describing." And they're like, "I don't know," and I was like, "What? Okay, I don't know what to tell you then."

Aimi Hamraie:

It sounds like a lot of the discussions that are happening around alternative audio description in terms of do you describe what someone's perceived race is, or what your perception of their race is? Like if you can't ask them or you don't know who they are, if their looking at a photo. Or their gender, and people have like really strong feelings about what the right thing to do is and still provide the necessary information.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, that's a good model of a practice. I also want to go back to something you said about describing dance, so I just interviewed Alice Sheppard a couple of days ago. She was talking about how difficult it is to describe dance [crosstalk 00:28:23], that's also its own form of artistry. So what were some of the descriptions and strategies for description that came about around that?

Sky Cubacub:

Maybe we should ask Jake here, because Jake was the one who has smooshing together all the describing. I am not a lyrics writer at all, and I am not a musician so they might be a good person. Is that okay?

Aimi Hamraie:

Oh yeah, totally.

Sky Cubacub:

Cool. I'll give you the headset Jake.

Jake Vogds:

Hey.

Aimi Hamraie:

Hey Jake.

Jake Vogds:

How's it going? Good.

Aimi Hamraie:

So I was just asking Sky about describing dance, like how that goes in terms of people describing these sort of aesthetic movements for an audience.

Jake Vogds:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. I think that was one of the most fun parts that we got back from the models. I think they had really fun with it and kind of poking fun at different things, of ways that they dance and so I think that that ... I don't know, that kind of got the most creative because movement is such a different thing to describe then like a visual or something. Like color is ... well color isn't exactly objective but it can be sometimes a little bit more graspable. But I think that dance, it was just totally, the way that people described it was ... I don't know, up to their personality and up to their ways of thinking about themselves moving through space. I think there was a lot of unexpected things. I think somebody, let me see, I need to look through some of them, but like a willowy queer is what somebody called themselves.

Jake Vogds:

Willowy, is just an interesting descriptive word. And since it's full spectrum of ability, there's a model that did acrobatics, so they described their acrobatic motion. So there's kind of a full range of different emotions that get described. Or just even sometimes subtle emotions people would describe, like dropping down low. It's funny to think about it because I bet people, and also models normally, in a dance show don't get ... or normally in like a fashion show or anything, don't get as much agency I feel like as Rebirth and as Radical Visibility Collective, hopes to offer to models, in terms of really defining themselves, and customizing the clothing to themselves with us and then sort of designing from there.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah. Very cool. Thank you for sharing that.

Jake Vogds:

Totally.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, it's such an interesting set of practices that you're offering for us to think about doing in other kinds of spaces, too.

Jake Vogds:

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for asking. No, for sure. I can pass you around [inaudible 00:31:49].

Aimi Hamraie:

So based on that performance, you created a zine that has images of the garments with the text. And the music was like, was that music that you all created, as well?

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. So Jake Vogds was the music director, and they wrote lyrics for four of the songs and collaborated with a bunch of other Chicago folks, but also not local folks. And then the second song called Glitter was actually written and performed by my videographer's punk band, which was really cool. I pretty much grew up listening to punk music, so I wanted to have that of feel. And the last song me and Jake and Compton sang on it, which is like a nightmare for me because I don't, it's very scary hearing my voice. But yeah, so it was all completely custom made and we did everything, the whole thing was within three months. So it was quite a lot of work. But yeah, again for this next one Jake Vogds will be music directing and taking charge on that aspect.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, that's very cool. So what else do you have going on, what's next? Where are you taking these projects?

Sky Cubacub:

I had a pretty big interview like two days ago, which is why I'm trying to do this photo shoot really last minute. Because if it gets up there then I'm like, "Oh my God, I need a show with all these swimsuits, like right now." I guess I am going to be working on, actually my first all black collection, which seems like, it's completely in opposition to maybe what I usually like. But I think I'm interested in ... for that one I'm definitely focusing on textures so that one's like a radical texture line. Where did that pattern piece go?

Sky Cubacub:

So yeah, I've done an all white collection for my friend and collaborator, Sarah Weiss for Paris fashion week, which in Imani, AKA Crutches and Spice, modeled for. She for that collection. I like that one because it was all white and holographic and clear and it definitely looked like it was out of this world. But it was so heavily textured that people could ... like the way that it was color blocked with those textures was still very recognizably my clothing line. So yeah, I'll be playing with that in like a black collection. And then I've also been working more with custom prints, so I'll be doing a printing residency at the Print Shop LA at the end of this month. And I also had a bunch of custom prints made for me using photos of my father's oil paintings from the 70s, that are also very geometric and colorful.

Sky Cubacub:

And you can see them a lot on my Etsy because my studio has a bunch of them in the background. So those are the backdrops a lot of times. But yeah, so my friend Lindsay Whittle, who is sparklezilla on Instagram, made me some repeat prints of his paintings and I did a whole collection within, basically starting a month after he passed away. So it was right after I planned his memorial and then I did a whole collection and showed that in the Carnegie Arts Center in Covington, Kentucky. So all that stuff is there right now. But once I get it back then yeah, I think I'll be working on more of those custom prints.

Sky Cubacub:

I think that's a way to kind of level up the aesthetic by making our own prints. So I'm also working on a kind of different reading level versions of the manifesto. Starting with a picture book with minimal words, I really want to bring the manifesto to different ages of folks. But also to different reading levels of folks from the different kinds of age groups that I have worked with for my NoSo fashion and performance workshops. I'll get similar questions from different folks. So I'm just trying to catalog those questions that I get the most, from each kind of level or whatever. I don't know, I don't like that, levels. I don't know how to describe it. Then try to answer those questions in maybe each a different scene. It might be just like a series of mini books. The manifesto zine is a bazillion pages for a zine, it's 47 pages. I mean it's all in 16 point font, and the whole end is all a six page bibliography.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah. That sounds like a really awesome project. I'm excited to see what you come up with. Well, thank you so much Sky. I'm really grateful for your time and excited to get this episode out into the world for people to engage with.

Sky Cubacub:

I'm excited, too. Sorry I was working the whole time at the same time.

Aimi Hamraie:

No, it was actually really amazing. I was thinking while you're doing it, like I should really ask more people to do interviews while they're making stuff because it kind of puts you in a different brain space and body space and stuff to be talking while you're making things.

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie:

And I love to seeing your studio, too. How can people support your work? Like if they're listening to this, or reading the transcript, where are places that they can look at your work, or buy it, or commission?

Sky Cubacub:

Yeah. So you can go to rebirthgarments.com, or you can go to my Etsy, which you can either search RebirthGarments smooshed together as one word in the Etsy search bar, or you can type in etsy.com/shop/rebirthgarments, again smooshed all together. You can follow me on Instagram at rebirthgarments and Twitter, although I am bad at Twitter. And then I also have a GoFundMe that my friend Emma Alamo and I started for a trans teen who we've been supporting financially and emotionally, et cetera. Trying to pay for all of his education and his top surgery because he had to separate from a really terrifying family situation. Yeah. He's also a person with different kinds of disabilities and things like that. So yeah, I think that's a good way to support.

Announcing Crip Ritual project: 

All cultures have rituals. Rituals can be ways to change material circumstances, politics, lived experience, or even spiritual realities. So rituals are a method for designing a better world. In disability culture, we often use rituals as ways of designing and anticipating a more accessible future. What role does ritual play in your life, and what rituals could you imagine designing to ensure a better future for you and other members of disability culture and community? The Critical Design Lab invites submissions to an art exhibition called Crip Ritual, which will be on display in Spring 2021. You can submit your artworks to the exhibition for consideration via our website, www.cripritual.com, or participate on social media using #cripritual.

Outro: 

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