Deborah Schamoni

“You don’t need to be fixed, my queens—it’s the world that needs the fixing.”
— Johanna Hedva

In a world that builds on unceasing bodily functionality, mobility, availability, and their constant expansion, every form of dysfunctionality leads to immediate exclusion or is declared in need of treatment. The violence inherent to normative conceptions of the body, and thus to education, labor, architecture, medicine, and pharmacology, is fatal. Human beings are constantly restricted and disabled by social barriers. Accessibility, however, is the basis for participation and justice. Sickness is not an individual but a collective societal matter. Health is not just a questionof medicine, it is a political terrain defined by social power relations.

Individual autonomy is a myth. Recognition of our mutual dependence, however, can help us rethink society. Rather than constant availability, the term “crip time” is based on the idea of multiple needs. Changed temporalities can come about, new forms of care and connection can develop, and a different way of thinking and perceiving can take hold.

The order of the day is to understand the vulnerability of our bodies as something constitutive. It is our vulnerability that makes us sensitive, perceptive, and different from one another.

[…]

Author Christine Miserandino has coined a metaphor for the everyday experiences of people with chronic illness and disability: her so-called “Spoon Theory,” in which an individual’s energy reserves are measured in numbers of spoons. Every activity, whether making one’s way somewhere, entering a museum space, or spending time in an exhibition, costs energy—figuratively, “one spoon of strength.” The question as to what types of barriers must be surmounted in undertaking any activity presents itself in every aspectof daily life. Thus, the universal claim of design—to create architectures and products to be used by everyone alike—consistently excludes people. Standardized concepts of form and structure are based on notions of the body that provide no room for the diversity of different body types or the needs of people with disabilities: “It’s the inaccessibility of society and the built environment, not the disabled body that creates a misfit,” explains Aimi Hamraie. For such bodies, the everyday environment constantly demandsan exhausting adaptation to the conditions of nondisabled bodies—those bodies socially deemed both physically and mentally “healthy.”

Placed throughout the exhibition space, Shannon Finnegan’s benches and chaise lounges invitingly offer spaces for rest and relaxation, spaces for the presence of the body and its needs: “This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree,” reads a text on one of the benches in the exhibition. There are many places where no provisions seem to have been made for people and their basic physical needs, their tiredness and exhaustion, for example, within the white cube of the contemporary art world, in which furnishings themselves can become art. Finnegan shows that access can only be ensured where the ideology of a conforming, normativebody is unlearned and spaces are reconceived on the basis of multiple needs. In this way, the act of sitting recalls the sit-in as a protest form, with its occupation of space suggesting the presence of political bodies who often remain invisible at the protest marches where participants are required to be mobile.

Text: MMK, Frankfurt
Photos: Axel Schneider
Image courtesy: Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main