“Does your work serve you?”

Excerpts from a very long conversation with Carmen Papalia, on Art, Access, and Institutions, April 2019 Vancouver, BC

<< This isn’t a verbatim transcript of our conversation – it’s been edited slightly to make sense of our words and thoughts. But you can listen to the full 1.5hr interview, including all the times I say ‘Like’, ‘Right’ and ‘Interesting’ as well as a TON more rich discourse and ideas, in the audio versions>>

E. I want to dig into your own access needs – thinking of this upcoming animation project (with Heather Kai Smith at the Banff centre) and other previous works, why do you work in visual and media arts?

Carmen Papalia: Because sometimes I feel like speaking to a certain audience and in a certain way there is value to that and I like to claim Visual space and drawing attention to in an idea in a visual sort of way. I mean do that myself in other work by making a spectacle around me – with the long cane or the marching band project. With animation I was thinking of it as another way to deliver the open access tenants. To date – I really just have been sharing by word of moth and printed work –

E. and this was another access point?

C. – right? And I think about this sometimes too – who do I make work for? And for me it mostly comes down to - I make work for myself…and in the interest of my community – but I make work I think for people who still need perceptions to be shifted. That are maybe holding power and maybe need to unlearn aspects of ableism.

E. Ok so this logic that - disability arts came from disability rights – it came from a place where we do want to shift perceptions – so there is this relationship to counter dangerous narratives – however I do struggle because I think there are a large number of artists who make work that they themselves can’t access. So to what extent do we make this protest?

I’m thinking about this exhibition that was hosted by the Canadian Human Rights Museum, which included the work of blind photographers – and the labels included the medical condition of each artist - and while there these tactile versions of the images… I was like I want to unpack ‘the blind photographer’. Why work in a medium that is personally inaccessible, I don’t know.

C. I think the reasons I feel ok not serving my own… I like speaking to myself with my work sometimes through making something visual you know. Because the material of my work is the relationship – it’s relational – and it’s dialogue based too – I can express in many ways – but really what I am getting at is shifting perceptions and shifting culture in some cases, so I really think there are many ways to express that. Sometimes I want to express that visually – sometimes I want to trouble the visual. There are so many different kind of learners in the world – even if I’m speaking to a visual learner… I think with the performances I do, sometimes what I like is creating a situation that is easily understood – as a one liner- people know what I am doing when I replace my cane with other things – and try to get around the city. But then you can take it a bit deeper into what are the power dynamics of that whole situation is.

E. You’ve touched on something here that probably I missed in my own premising of this research project – which is thinking about the tension there between work that centres the access needs of folks with disabilities and Deaf folks, at it’s core, with disability arts discourse which is aimed at having a critical discourse with non-disabled audiences- that is an interesting place to dig into. Or can it be both?

C. I don’t think I do a good job of doing both at the same time. I feel like I need to work on one and then work on the other, I mean sometimes It works for both audiences – but sometimes I’m not worried about both audiences. Because I’m speaking to one group that I want to be speaking to – so I don’t know. It’s hard.

So I did a version of the Marching Band in the UK when I was working with the Victoria Albert Museum, but it was with a Foley sound artist and so I was working with this Foley artist from the BBC who does physical sound effects for radio drama, and she was pulling from this library of devices she uses to make sound effects and she was referring to things in the room that I was passing or about to run into and so there were all these sound pallets referring to the spaces I was moving through. I invited all the folks I was working with on this like Liz Carr and all of the artists she was working with to experience it using a blind fold while moving through the space. And there were people who were blind who visiting the show and they only had sound in the show as their reference, and they were really upset about it! This performance was really for me. I am privileging my own access through the experience of this piece first and the second audience is the folks that I invited. And within that group there are those with various access to the work but for those who are also non-visual learners they will have access to the piece…. It was really about the sound that I was making to navigate this place.

But I was troubled by the fact that I didn’t accommodate somebody that often has marginal experience in those spaces.

E. When you think of other artists that you are interested in experiencing their work or other modes – specifically what were going to call visual or media arts - are there artists that sort of stand out to you whose work you feel is accessible to you or at least is created in such a way that you enjoy it?

C. The work that I like - the concept is provocative and that is the thing I am really drawn to. In grad school I really loved the work of Temporary Services in Chicago they are this group that would do a lot of intervention based work in public spaces. Place things in public and people would respond in various ways. I like work that is kinda cheeky. I’m more interested in the concept than me experiencing it in the moment. Because that is always falling short in terms of what the artists intention was for the audiences. When I am in a gallery I prefer experiencing work, by being led by a friend and it is described in a subjective kind of way or by the artist is ideal or by the curator is ideal. But most often it’s just a friend describing it and that is the way I receive it.

E. Right and that is a space I’m curious about. As a visual artist I was trained in very specific techniques in terms of studio and conceptual practices, that are premised on a sighted audience and so much of the access around those practice is based on description. I am intrigued by an artist like Janet Cardiff, who creates audio experiences that are complimented but not dependant on a visual experience, thinking of her audio walks. I want to challenge myself to hone techniques that reconsider the visual dependence of a work without ignoring the conceptual or other elements to it… I was going to say that description is always a translation but I think when description gets interesting, thinking of Slumberparty 2018 and the ways that description can and could become an intentional part of an artistic practice.

C. Yeah for sure. I think when you embrace those things as part of the artistic production it changes the intention behind it. I’ve always loved that idea of a translation as apiece it of itself. To understand my own access to a visual work. I could say that the work and the translation are equal. I understand that they are different and hold different value in a social sense. And a cultural sense, but still – Barak (adé Soleil) has introduced me to something I’m just now learning about – aesthetics of access…

>>Then we had an amazing conversation for like an hour about aesthetics of access, art gallery ablism and institutional incapacity to be “open and inclusive” because they are based structurally on ablest ideals. You can hear it all in the audio version Part 2. >>

E. I want to go back to what your self-premised practice is or could be…

C. What would be my self-premised practice. There was an opportunity to make a new work for one of Amanda (Cachia)’s shows. She wanted to show the walking tour project and for her previous show I just put prints up on the wall. I was like why am I doing this? It felt super unsatisfying. So with this opportunity to make new work, it was intended as a way for people to appreciate or understand the walking tour in the gallery setting and I was like ‘I don’t even know what to do. That whole space is so restrictive. How do I make work for myself in it? Something I would want to participate in?’

I was asked by one of my Grad school teachers, “what do you want your experience to be if you walked into the gallery” and I had never thought of that previously. ‘I can serve myself? I want to listen to it. I want to listen my walk’.

So I worked with an audio producer in Portland and we recorded each participant on the walk and on a series of walks. There are about 10 feeds. I should do more work like this… and those pieces were installed in a tunnel at different heights – so you got a person’s vantage point while they were walking in the line of participants. You could just be immersed by the audio documentation from my walk. From the beginning to the end of the walk. Could you still immerse someone in an experiential work that is from another time? And I did. That did it for me. And I think that was an example of me trying to accommodate my own access in that situation.

Since then, what I look at now, are what are the barriers in institutions that are keeping people out. I am interested in figuring that out what are the disabling practises, premises, traditions. I think a lot of it is tradition. Where it is just passed down as the way that we do things. Who does that really work for? Most people it doesn’t work for.

I’ve really been thinking about institutional power lately and how to manage support through intuitions and through their investment.

E. So when you’ve shifted from a personal artistic perspective of access – to a broader high level lens of institutional access for a much broader community.

C. Going back to the aesthetics of access which I was learning from Barak (Ade Soeil), How do I support an artist in making something in the way that they want to present it? Then after we can retrofit it for a typical audience. I want to support more artistic inquiry among folks in the disability community and also the various intersections with other communities. I want to interrogate the museum as a system. Because it works similarity to other institutions – What is my mobility within that system? What is my freedom of movement? What are my opportunities for decision making? That is more what I am interested in and I want the freedom to make more work.

E. In this work, I find myself constantly in this circle of wanting to develop and exists and thrive as an artist and as an artist who is curious about interdependence and collaboration and co-curation and Nothing About Us Without Us, and so I am constantly shifting into thinking like a curator but also as an artist. I think what I need to do is stop fighting it and embrace it as blended practice, instead of feeling like it has to be one or the other. I feel like we are on the same page on this.

C. I don’t think curating is separate from our experience managing our own access needs - its what we do. We have find our supports. We have to curate our environments so they work for us. We have to do that social conditioning of the people around us to make a case for why a thing is like this and why other people should honour it in that way.

E. I think within the Dis arts community in Canada and beyond, and I think there is a big need ad potential for harnessing all of these artists who are working interdependently for us to come together in more and more consistent ways – and to have curatorial and artist relationships amongst ourselves. And to be interdependent in terms of proving that support or that feedback because it also it can also can help feed into those institutional relationships that are not the ideals.