An exhibition on the collaboration of disability justice advocate, singer, performer, artist and teacher-researcher Mira Thompson and award-winning costume-designer, curator, artist and teacher-researcher Carly Everaert. The exhibition will take place from the 15th until the 28th of May at VOX-POP (Binnengasthuisstraat 9, Amsterdam)
Thompson and Everaert started working together within Everaert’s Radical Thinking course at the Scenography department of the Academy of Theater and Dance in Amsterdam.
Both Everaert and Thompson have a keen interest how intersectional theory and embodied knowledge can be implemented in the curricula of the (performing) arts.
They aim to create a way of working which stems from an embodied disability knowledge perspective. Within their collaboration they seek to bring these unexplored perspectives into the canon: to change the way we look at art-practices and its aesthetics through these unseen bodies of work.
The exhibition will showcase the first two open-source video-lessons they produced within their ongoing research project “Interdependence: On Disability Justice and the (Performing) Arts “
Both video-lessons “On access intimacy” and “On pain worth sharing” will be shown on screens. The assignments within the lessons can be practiced for two weeks at VOX-POP as the accompanying manuals and image-description will be available in print. Art materials will be provided, too.
Letter writing has been an important research method in the collaboration between Thompson and Everaert. They have been using this embodied practice in their work and collaborations. Letter exchanges that will be on display in the exhibition are between Thompson & Everaert , Laura Cull ó Maoilearca & Thompson and Menko Dijksterhuis & Everaert.
Interdependence is a project within the Lectorate of the Academy of Theatre and Dance in collaboration with Platform 2025 as part of the Thematic Collaboration Program of the Amsterdam University of the Arts.
The exhibition is freely accessible from the 16th until the 28th of May at VOX-POP between 9:00 – 18:00.
Program:
15th of May 15:45 – 18:00: OPENING
15:45: walk-in
16:00 Introduction “Interdependence: On Disability Justice and the (Performing) Arts by Laura Cull ó Maoilearca
16:15: LAUNCH of the video-essay lesson “On pain worth sharing.”
16:45-17:00: Q and A with Everaert and Thompson moderated by Laura Cull ó Maoilearca
18:00: closing
22nd of May 16:00 – 17:30:
EXCLUSIVE: Workshop: Mira Thompson and Carly Everaert will be teaching in person their video-essay lesson “On pain worth sharing.”
28th of May 10:30 until 12:00:
Toni Kritzer: Lecture on their Sick Garden project
THE SICK GARDEN entangles Ton'is story of illness and disability with the life of an abandoned garden. This is a story of slugs and viruses, of contamination, compost and the complexities of care. Following the sticky slime trails of chronic illness, we encounter disabled ecologies and inter*species webs of support. There are whispers from below the leaf litter, the underlands, the kingdom of the sick: THE SICK GARDEN calls us to rest our tired, aching bodies, and to resist capitalist-eugenicist ideas of productivity and purity. If we cannot return to a romanticized condition of “health”, which forms of care and tending-to can we find in the open wounds, the injuries, the impairment? Questioning narratives of disability and sickness in ecosystems and in ourselves, Toni wonders how healing, both in the human and more-than-human, might be possible beyond restoration. How do we encounter our sick gardens?
It is also possible to join the launch and the lecture by Toni Kritzer online through these links:
The launch on the 15th of May:
zoom.us/j/97239687831
Meeting-ID: 972 3968 7831
Password: 510976
The lecture on the 28th of May:
zoom.us/j/92552153163
Meeting-ID: 925 5215 3163
Password: 020361
