Intro

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[Music] [Applause]

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[Music] [Applause]

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[Music] [Applause] and sean we would love it if we could

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start at the beginnings could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your practice

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sure um i guess i’ll start my introduction actually within image description so my

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name’s sean um i use he or they pronouns i’m

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i present as male i’m an east asian chinese person and i’m someone who’s

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visibly disabled uh my back curves my shoulders are uneven and if you met me

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in real life i’d be quite short i’ve got kind of

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black hair that comes down to my shoulders beyond my shoulders at this point um i’m wearing

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these like kind of steampunk glasses they’re green with like

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gold rims that float on the frames i’m wearing like a black t-shirt the the

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shirt says the future is accessible and it’s a it’s

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a shirt made by um a disability youtuber annie segarra um

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and i’m in my live i’m in my dining room i’ve got kind of like a a little bit of art behind me it’s like

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a painting and otherwise it’s a pretty nondescript room and

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um about me i am a disability artist and a curator

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i’m the director of programming at tangled art and disability um we’re

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based in the traditional territories of the anishinaabe the huden shonei and the

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huron wenda and the mississauga’s of the credit um on treaty 13 territory here in toronto

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um and tangled art and disability runs um the a gallery space the it was the first

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of its kind to open in canada that’s dedicated to

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exhibiting mad deaf disabled artists and uh exploring and advancing accessible

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curatorial practices yeah so that’s a little bit about me

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awesome thank you i wonder if i could ask a follow-up question

Philosophy on Accessibility

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because you have shared uh so much um of your thinking and readings that have

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inspired you and um uh tangled is a fantastic organization and

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obviously you’re very uh integrated into its running you’re the artistic

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leader of that organization but um what i feel like i learned so much about

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your own [Music] personal philosophy about accessibility curating

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looking at the materials that you shared shared with us and i wonder if you could talk a

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little bit about that philosophy that you bring to the organization that you lead

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sure yeah um i mean i think a lot of

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the way that i curate is really to center

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disability as a difference that matters and

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when i say that you know i i think there are a lot of ideas that you know

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disability arts is about including disabled people into normative culture

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but actually i think a lot of what we’re trying to do in uh

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what i’m trying to do through my practice is to really help um change the conversation and shift the

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way that we understand disability because it’s always at least for myself um i shouldn’t seem

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for everyone but like as as someone who um has lived experience as a disabled

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person has always had lived experience as a disabled person um going to art

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school i never really had an opportunity to explore ideas of disability

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culture or disability community and i think that’s really what i’m trying to foreground in

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my practice here is this idea that

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disability community exists you know that there is a culture that we all um participate in and

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for me like accessible curation that’s a huge part of it because access is as

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disability um justice uh activist mia mingus tells us access is concrete

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resistance to the kind of isolated histories that disabled people have lived it’s a way of

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understanding that disability is not just located in our bodies but it’s it’s

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constructed and the barriers we face the ableist uh structures that exist are ultimately one

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of the biggest factors for creating um the the kind of uh

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ableist uh and and inaccessible art structures that

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we’re in today and so for me like i i really enjoy creating crypt culture i love

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experimenting with it and um building solidarity within our communities

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i use disability arts often times as an umbrella term but you know there are we have uh within

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uh disability arts you know we have like artists uh we have mad artists we have uh deaf

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artists we have uh sick spoony chronically ill you know neurodiverse and neuro-emergent

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artists and you know we we all come at it from kind of different places of

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lived experience but i think the through line of my practice is that we’re trying

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to you know reimagine the world as a more equitable place and

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the world as a more accessible one that really you know fully understands uh disability

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as as i said a difference that matters

Feminist Art Field School

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extraordinary you know one of the things that we’ve been reckoning with as we build

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our course together or our experience together is the container of feminist

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art field school as what we call ourselves and i wonder uh

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if you might be willing to think out loud with us about those words as a container and whether or not they

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resonate or some of the sparks that we might be able to connect to the work that you do with tangled and

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genres like art or feminist art yeah of course like

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i i mean i i think feminist art was my introduction into kind of critical access and into uh

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you know critical disability um understandings and critical disability study like for me feminist

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art can exist without really an intersectional lens that includes an analysis of disability justice

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and you know just like in feminism where we understand that there are structural things that create

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the social kind of meanings that are assigned to to people like i i think more and more we’re beginning

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to understand that we can’t be siloed in our uh in our fields

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i there’s um an incredible definition of ableism that delilah t.l lewis who’s a disability

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justice activist has has helped um

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has created alongside other um like black bipoc uh disabled activists

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and that definition of ableism is it’s it’s really

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i think it captures a lot of my thoughts around um

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essentially why we have to include um ableism in that analysis and i’ll just

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kind of recall it as best as i can it essentially says that

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ableism is kind of a ableism dictates how we uh how we move

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and how we uh are valued in society you know it it

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pits us against this kind of mythic norm of what is

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um what is valuable and

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it’s it it really tells us that ableism is part of a system that like values

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people based on just like these socially constructed ideas of what is you know

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normal or desirable or productive and you know it’s it’s intersectional

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these these constructed ideas are cobbled together from eugenics misogyny

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anti-blackness colonialism capitalism especially capitalism um and

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so you know it tells us who’s valuable in society and you don’t actually i think

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the most important part here is that um tl says you do not have to be disabled

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to experience ableism and i think that really changed my understanding of what disability is like that ableism is

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structural and that it affects us all and so when we talk about feminist arts um when we talk about feminism in

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general like if if your feminism doesn’t include disability then is it truly

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feminism is it is it truly understanding all the ways that you know ableism has

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actually been what upholds a lot of the other ways people are oppressed like

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we have to include it in that analysis because when we think you know as queer folks about how

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um we were things were justified in terms of uh

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of discriminating against queer folks it was through this lens of mental illness through a lens of

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disability and that’s often how it was employed that’s disability oftentimes is

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employed against other uh other groups other marginalized groups

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and so it’s really it’s vital to have accessible um

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accessible gatherings it’s important to have disability as part of um

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these conversations because otherwise we can fall so easily into repeating uh

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the tropes that have created these structures in the first place

The Power of Disability Art

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fantastic are we are we throwing the mic back and forth let’s do it i’m

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having a great time i could listen to shawn all day so i’m just trying to think of the best way to

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prompt him to to do it again um i’m thinking about uh

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um the phrase that you used uh to title your

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your um appearance on the podcast the secret feminist agenda podcast

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disability art is the last avant-garde and just thinking about that phrase in

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um in relationship to chase’s question about the name of this course and um

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uh the commentary that you just made i mean to me as a

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nerdy art historian um that uh that describes

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disability art as something so powerful and i wonder if you could uh talk a

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little bit about the phrase and where it comes from and what it means to you

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and um that idea of the power of disability art

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yeah well i i should start by saying that that phrase the last avant-garde is um

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a phrase that that was coined by yinka nabare who’s um uh and a critically acclaimed artist

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in the uk um he’s um a disabled artist as well and

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it came from a panel that he was on uh in 2007 where he he kind of asserted

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that disability arts is the last remaining avant-garde movement and i think like it was so powerful to me and

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as someone who’s just being introduced to disability arts at the time

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not necessarily even really politically aligning myself with disability that that understanding that reframing was

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really an important way of how i understood and valued disability arts and it was really

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exciting you know i think what yinka was doing was like

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observing that there was there was there is an emerging

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and kind of growing momentum of disability arts and this growth for him parallel movements

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like feminist arts black arts queer arts you know movements in the 60s that were

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really powerful vehicles for social change and were able to kind of upend

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the the art sector for and resist kind of the

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the ways that the art sector had stagnated and so i think

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really like yinka’s assertion that disability arts is the last of on guard kind of

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unapologetically centers uh disabled artists and culture and

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it it asks us to understand that these practices are new

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new to the mainstream i should say and a lot of these practices are not understood they’re oftentimes um

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anti-capitalists they’re times about uh about discomfort there are often times

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about you know different ways of being and and there’s a disability

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scholar named kelly fritsch who um created this definition of the word

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is like a reclaimed uh word that we use in the community and kelly

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started using it as a verb to which meant um to open with desire for the way

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that disability disrupts and for me that’s that’s kind of what this last avant-garde is about it’s about you know

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cultural practices that disrupt our budgets that disrupt our timelines that

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disrupt uh you know our expectations for productivity and i think those are all

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ways that we we reimagine the world through disability arts like i think art

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holds that possibility right to um to not only like

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to not only showcase really beautiful works and to not only showcase the messages of the artist but really to

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actually reimagine the worlds that we’re living in through you know curation through care through

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kind of the mutual ways that um we we can gather and

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so for me like this idea of the last avant-garde is so exciting because

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it it simultaneously situates the movement um within

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kind of you know the artistic movements that currently exist but also asks us to

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understand that it’s something we don’t know yet it’s something that is um

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still being developed and it’s still being formalized and um for me like disabled artists are

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really important because we’re changing the framework of

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how the arts industry uh functions and moves and

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how it’s how it values uh where it places its value essentially

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extraordinary i feel like i’m sparking in in all kinds of directions and one of the things that i think about a lot as a

Critical Disability Curation

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filmmaker and someone who you know learned how to make films in activist and experimental

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places and has since moved toward the more mainstream industrial apparatus of

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cinema and media making one of the things that’s interesting about that move is the ways in which you

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get to see how the institutions work and the politics of gatekeeping and inclusion and exclusion that keeps the

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avant-garde the avant-garde and the mainstream the mainstream right and so there’s so many connections there to what you’re saying and i wonder if we

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can continue the conversation by integrating you know what is a critical

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disability curatorial practice how do we think about curation as such a central mode of making and

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unmaking in these ways yeah like you know that was something that i

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coming into my my role i really started off as an artist um as someone

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who you know was was trying to piecemeal my own understanding of disability and so

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when i first came to tangled i when when i learned about accessible

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curation for instance i was really still under the impression that

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access was something that you could scientifically quantify

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that like if you if you learned about the many standards and checklists that that was

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about creating access and you know people throw around the word

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fully accessible all the time but in my work at tangled i’m beginning to understand more and more that like

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we’re never gonna be fully accessible and you can’t sort of be fully accessible and i think that’s the that’s

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the beauty of it is that when we’re doing this kind of work um

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we’re constantly relearning and unlearning and for me

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there’s there’s this idea that um disability scholar amy hamrai puts

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forward which is called critical access and critical access sort of

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it it rejects this idea that access is always good for everyone which is kind of how

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in the 60s and 70s when the disability rights movement emerged um

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that was kind of how they how the disability rights movement got

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buy-in was to convince you know architects that good design is always good for everybody and we’re beginning

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to maybe resist this notion through amy’s idea of critical access we’re beginning

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to understand that maybe access needs to center disabled people and that sometimes um it disrupts or

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creates discomfort for able-bodied folks that has to be a part of how we negotiate our relationships to one

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another i think you know for instance um

Colonial Comfort

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in in an exhibition that we did um in 2017 one of the earliest uh one one of

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the first shows that i was involved with um we worked with an incredible artist uh vanessa dion

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fletcher who’s a lenape and pogbatomi neurodiverse artist

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and uh vanessa had had an exhibition called own your cervix in which

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um she used uh you know porcupine quills and menstrual

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blood as a way of understanding colonization hold on our bodies um i

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could get into the the whole exhibition but the part i want to focus on is this this one piece called colonial

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comfort that vanessa created which was like a white sette it was uh like a

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little couch two two-person couch it was an old victorian style sete that she

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amplified the textures and design with her menstrual blood and with porcupine

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quills and a big part of how we show this work was the idea of

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safety you know like can we safely

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um like place the work and allow folks to engage with it when there are porcupine

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quills you know if someone um comes in who’s from the blind or low vision community like how do they safely engage

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with this work and you know we kind of went back and forth we thought you know do we does it

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go on a pedestal do we put a rope around it um

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and i think these were all things that we thought of and then at the end what we decided was

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actually every time someone comes into our gallery we would just let them know that there are porcupine quills and we would

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help guide them to interact with the work as much as they want um and so we we were

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still creating access but i think it was about letting folks

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engage with the work the way they need to and i think that was a really fundamental moment for me because i was

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always understanding accessibility as creating independence and instead here we were

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creating what called interdependence you know um i think interdependence and access those

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are really like our communities addressed to ableism and you know it’s all it’s all very linked

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back to the ways that we can try to decolonize our spaces and to clear our spaces

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because it’s it’s all really linked back together and so i i think for me

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this commitment that we were making towards disability justice and decolon

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decolonizing through vanessa’s exhibition that was like a really fundamental change for me and

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understanding like yeah access isn’t always about um

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making this very scientific very kind of

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compliance-based way of um curating and exhibiting the work

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sometimes it’s about um doing what you can with the resources that you have

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uh you know maybe if we had unlimited resources we would have been able to find some other way some automated

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magical way someone comes near it the lights come off the big sign comes like something like that but you know

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folks we’ve always had to hack inaccessible spaces we’ve always had to

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just create um you know like like protocols and methods

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for handling things even at the beginning when i described to myself um for for folks i think that was a part

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of disability culture it’s a way that you know we can hack zoom in a way to to

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allow for folks who are you know blind or low vision to come on and to understand

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you know what kind of space is being created

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thank you um that was fantastic and uh just to

Visual Description

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to quickly touch on your your um visual description of of yourself

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when i um and am asked to do that in zoom meetings i’m like uh

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i don’t know i’m a middle-aged black woman with black hair and a red sweater and like the um

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the facility with which you described yourself

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uh to really give a complete visual picture is is i guess

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practiced and um you know an indication of um

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a kind of a skill building that that we have to the rest of us who don’t know

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how to do that yet have to participate in in order to make this zoom space truly

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um a more comfortable space for for more people

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yeah and and i i just want to say like it really is about practice because i

Audio Description

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am not the best at describing myself like i remember when i first

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had to describe myself like i had no idea what to include um

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i didn’t know how to describe you know my glasses my skin color like do i describe disability and then like

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actually that ended up being a very political choice that i’ve continued to make every time i come into a space

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is to really identify myself as someone who’s visibly disabled because like when you when you go into

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space together like physically that’s what happens everyone can

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for those who are sighted like everyone can easily see that i’m um visibly disabled so i think

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we i i want to create that same sense through description and there’s

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there’s lots of um there’s so many incredible artists doing

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really interesting things with audio description you know like that that goes back to my standardization

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mark remarks like i think there’s this there there are standards that have been created about

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audio description but then there are there are all these artists and all

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these uh you know activists doing really creative things with audio description

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using it in poetic ways integrating it into the aesthetic of what they do and

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that’s that’s also important right like making access not just an add-on but like part of a cultural aesthetic

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and something that we consistently do i think is really

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important absolutely um the other thing that i wanted to to

The Creative Solution

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touch on out of your last comment um i hope i’m not hogging the mic chase um

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is the idea that um the solution that you came up for vanessa dion fletcher’s

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show was you know the creative solution that you had to come up with because you’ve had

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limited financial resources and thinking about the

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the kind of large mainstream public institutions that i’ve worked in

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i think that your solution is was so beautiful and i think to myself oh you know gosh

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how would we ever do that because we can’t have a person um guide everybody who comes to the show

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to the piece um so there’s a different kind of lack in

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mainstream institutions there’s plenty of money but not as much

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relational wealth and um i hope i’m not

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coming to this question too soon but it’s the one that um you know is always at the front of my

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mind like what what do you think the capacity of larger public institutions

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are to to be more responsible in um uh

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fighting ableism in representing um artists from the disability community

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and really being a part of this conversation and a kind of related uh

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question is can you talk a little bit about the partnerships that you do do with mainstream

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institutions definitely yeah it’s it’s such an interesting question when

Leadership

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you ask because i’m i i balance kind of two uh [Music]

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two kind of schools of thought when when we do this you know because i i want institutions

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to invest in this and it needs to be a long-term thing but on the other hand you know

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it can be really frustrating because institutions do have a lot more resources and if they simply made a

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commitment to it that it could go a lot quicker um

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and so oftentimes what i what i try to talk about is

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really centering the community and and trying like one of the tenets of disability justice is

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leadership of the most impacted i think for a lot of institutions it’s easy to

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i shouldn’t say it’s easy but it’s much easier to create

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one exhibition where perhaps a disabled artist can come in

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and showcase their works but it’s it’s much harder to kind of genuinely commit in a long

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term to that and i i think that is what needs to happen it’s like more leadership from

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uh from the community and more opportunities for leadership from the

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community i think it starts with you know a lot of

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uh a lot of consultations to be honest um to understand

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what you don’t even know and to understand you know

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why the community may be for instance uh hesitant at first to

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engage with the community um there’s that what i oftentimes say with the

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institutions that we work with is you you can’t only do this once if you try

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to do everything perfectly one time then perhaps you’ve created access

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through that one program but you haven’t actually made a commitment to the community and if folks can only ever go

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to one program a year or one program period like nobody would really want to

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invest in um that energy invest that kind of trust

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invest that um you know that that kind of time to engage with that institution if um it

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isn’t a real effort and so leadership i think is is the most important one

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um in in my work with other institutions it’s also been about

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opening to that discomfort um we have an exhibition coming up actually with um that we’re doing a

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partnership with the robert mclaughlin um gallery in in uh in oshawa

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and uh one of the artists as lynn thomas is creating what she’s calling what they’re

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calling uh an invisible sculpture um and

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this this sculpture is a commitment to fragrance-free space aslan’s someone who

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has multiple chemical sensitivities and oftentimes uh make may come in wearing a

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mask or a filter in order to try to mitigate some of these um chemicals that

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that folks may who are heavily perfumed may be wearing and so for this show where actually aslan

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actually proposed that we uh not allow folks who are heavily

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scented into our space and you know it’s it’s really it can be very uncomfortable for an institution

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to make that kind of commitment i think like i i really applaud the rmg for

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committing to this and it’s something that we’re going to be doing some training with their docents around i

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think a lot of folks are like how how do we do this but um that’s i think that’s the discomfort

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and the commitment level that we need is to understand from the artists like

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what if we shift our thinking to this because oftentimes there are scent-free policies but

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no one enforces them and you know that creates an accessibility

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for one group and so azan’s basically flipping the thinking around here aslan saying

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like well then what happens when we have it the other way around is isn’t that equally uncomfortable and why can’t it

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be equally uncomfortable that way and so i like you know that’s that’s one of the things that

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that i think is is exciting about working with institutions is actually making them uncomfortable

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um and and you know i i don’t mean it in like a in any sort of malicious way i

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a lot of folks are incredible allies within institutions um

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but i think when when folks are interested in disability arts like there needs to be this

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recognition that like you you commit to access you commit to

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the artists and you don’t try to create new harms when when you’re um

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when you are doing these programs fantastic thank you

Access as Cultural Aesthetic

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thank you so much i have to tell you that as you were speaking i furiously grabbed a post-it note

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and wrote you know access as cultural aesthetic and i’ve like my eyes have

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returned to this idea multiple times as you have been speaking and

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i’m so inspired to think about you know the artists who are using audio

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description as one way in which we can imagine that and i’m wondering if you could

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offer up perhaps other ways that we might think about access as cultural aesthetic

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yeah oh definitely i mean i think there’s there’s so many examples and

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there’s so many artists hacking the inaccessibility of like normative culture we we’ve got you know

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for instance artists working with vibration and sound as a way of kind of

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transcending the ways that you can experience sound art

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um we’ve got artists playing with captions in ways

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that are really interesting um that kind of may on on one level actually be

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inaccessible um for some and then like really interesting for others and

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they’re they’re doing it in ways that offer multiple entry points

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um for instance uh the artist who painted the piece behind me is valentin brown and valentin really

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committed to accessibility as an aesthetic within his work um

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you know i often talk about how artists gesture towards what i call a horizon i kind of

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took back from jose esteban munoz idea of a queer horizon

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um and you know i think it applies just as much to a horizon you know and elsewhere

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and elsewhen where um you know we’re in a utopia where

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folks have their access needs met where there’s intimacy through our access and

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valentin often takes on accessibility as an aesthetic for his

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pieces but he doesn’t do it in a very traditional way he had you know over

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or valentin had over a hundred pieces at our gallery and a

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thousand little sculptures in our space and you couldn’t possibly create

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um a traditional audio description because it would just be too

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daunting and it would be kind of un it wouldn’t really be an enjoyable

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listen because it would be this large opus of a track and each piece had

37:27

some similarities and so it really wouldn’t create the sense of what um

37:35

the exhibition is meant to evoke and so valentin instead um had had been writing

37:40

almost like diary entries um what they call uh what she calls captain’s logs in

37:46

the back of mountains works and so

37:52

the each piece um had this cap like many of the pieces had captains logs and

37:59

so instead valentin used those captains logs to create the audio description

38:04

and kind of created these um sound stations where folks could listen

38:09

to the the audio description and then uh mountain also created these tactile

38:16

elements it was a there was a big sculpture called big softy that had you know it

38:24

was made out of a lot of different fabrics a lot of really interesting tactile elements

38:30

if you touch a certain place it might squeak or it might uh be kind of

38:35

scratchy and other places uh could be really soft and you could hold it or you could take it apart and so

38:43

valentin was creating access not in a traditional way but instead complementing

38:49

um traditional visual art with uh tactile

38:54

elements there was also gloria swain who’s an incredible

39:00

uh black mad uh artist and activist we worked with

39:06

she programmed she curated an exhibition called hidden it was the last show that we that we had

39:12

before the pandemic kind of forced us to close our gallery space and during this process um

39:20

gloria had curated uh four other artists along herself

39:29

into the space but unfortunately one of the artists wasn’t able to be a part of the show anymore and while

39:35

there was potentially enough time to find another artist rather than draw the the artists like gloria decided to

39:43

hold an empty wall with text that wrote about kind of um holding space for this artist and every

39:50

artist who wasn’t able to really participate um and we paid a fee to that artist for

39:56

participating that that far into things and you know i think gloria was holding

40:02

access in a different way for the artists of the exhibition and also

40:08

to showcase access in a different way and we’ve since learned from that we’ve

40:14

put into the the very contracts that we signed with our artists a

40:19

what we’re calling for now we might find a better name for it like a care clause where you know

40:25

the productivity isn’t the most important thing the deliverable isn’t the most important thing it’s the

40:32

wellness and capacity of the artist and so if not

40:39

everything arrives that’s fine if nothing arrives that’s also fine you know it’s it’s about creating a space um

40:46

that tries to mitigate the inaccessibility of the very art world that we’re participating in

40:56

um yeah those are some examples of access off the top of my head but like i think

41:03

there are so many artists creating collaborative collective ways of doing this work

41:09

and oftentimes it’s through hacking it’s through

41:15

like you know very diy aspects and i think people are oftentimes surprised at that

41:20

because there is that they’re through things like the aoda the the the um accessibility for

41:28

ontarians with disabilities act and through like the ada the americans with disability acts in

41:34

the um in the us like the idea of access has

41:40

been kind of made into something that’s only ever about compliance and about

41:45

like the fear of reprisal if you don’t um

41:50

become accessible and while i think that’s that is important to have teeth behind

41:56

um you know resistant uh like parties to to access like

42:03

access can also be really joyous and it can be really exciting and liberatory and so

42:10

there’s numerous practices there there have been numerous failures as well and um you

42:17

know each time we learn something and i think each time we we come towards

42:22

something a little bit closer to that that horizon that idea of like a more

42:30

you know understanding intimate intersectional and

42:36

interdependent kind of arts sector

Where are you headed

42:45

um sean you have um just packed the last

42:51

45 or 50 minutes with so much information that um

42:56

i feel like we are at a point where we could move on to the last question

43:01

you’re already starting to um lean into those

43:06

sort of moments of visioning what what the future needs to look like so

43:12

our um our final question is where where are you headed and where where do we need to

43:19

be headed together yeah it it’s

43:25

well that question at the moment i always turn to

43:32

right now in in this moment in covid in the pandemic i think has been really um

43:40

has been really illuminating for us as an organization because it it

43:47

made us recognize just how untapped into the digital world that we

43:53

were like one of our practices was uh before covid was to live stream our

44:00

um openings but you know if you don’t do it in a very

44:06

meaningful way like it isn’t as effective and that’s kind of what we realized was

44:12

there’s so many possibilities um particularly because disabled people do often gather online

44:20

uh for digital content to be created and so that’s a big part of it is is

44:27

holding on to these hybrid um possibilities for for the future i’m i’m

44:34

worried that like a lot of capacity has been built around digital and then it’ll

44:40

be forgotten as soon as um a return to in-person events happens

44:45

and i think we we need to hold on to the new audience members we’ve created but more than anything else we need to

44:51

hold on to some of those more accessible practices that we’ve um we’ve learned how to how to do like

45:00

a lot of what’s happening right now a lot of the work from home the flexibility the the digital content

45:07

those are the things that disabled folks have been advocating for um

45:12

forever but it wasn’t until like this this unfortunately like like a

45:18

capitalist necessity necessity um created the opportunity for this that

45:23

these things happened up until then it was considered excessive but when it’s suddenly

45:30

the majority when it’s non-disabled people that also need this it’s it’s suddenly not excessive and i think

45:38

that’s that’s also what critical access tasks us with understanding is is you

45:43

know trying to be more understanding of how access

45:49

can really go beyond compliance and go beyond this

45:55

idea of only being a checklist you know and for us the hybrid is an exciting

46:02

place is a really it’s a site full of possibilities and that’s i think a big part of it is you

46:09

know for instance we one one of the experimental diys that

46:15

i’d like that maybe by the time this is showing will be um

46:20

a part of our practice definitely this year but like hopefully beyond is the ability to

46:27

book um a zoom drop in you know a guided tour through

46:33

uh we’re thinking an ipad but it may be different like you know where somebody can guide you

46:39

through the gallery and you can have an experience akin to dropping in and getting a tour from a

46:47

docent and it’ll be different but it’ll be but there are i think a lot of ways that

46:52

it could also be more accessible and more intimate and you know we’ll with we also love

46:59

in-person events and gatherings but we also really want to hold on to like the

47:05

digital ways that we can um program and create community so

47:11

that like only i think because the pandemic is so at

47:16

the moment that’s that’s where i’m i’m going with the future and i think a lot of other organizations

47:23

i hope do as well is is you know hold on to the capacity they’ve built digitally

47:29

and not just you know okay we don’t need to live stream anymore because we’re open again like i

47:37

think do both maybe maybe if you don’t have the capacity to

47:43

hold as many artist talks that means you do a little bit less and you keep the shows open longer and i think that’s

47:49

also something we’d like to see is is um

47:54

is just some slowing down and some uh like relaxing of the practices that

48:00

currently exist that i think a lot of us hopefully has at least at the beginning of the

48:06

pandemic took on was just trying to slow things down and yeah

48:13

hybrid models thank you so much for those thoughts you know when michelle and i first started

48:18

thinking about the field school together we had imagined it to be in person and imagined it to be in a much more

48:24

contracted time and we are so grateful for the opportunity to be in conversation with you and to actually

48:30

extend our time and slow down in our time and to continue to think of ways that our conversation and these

48:37

modules and these conversations that we’re having with students and other interlocutors can exist far beyond the

48:43

bounds of the field school itself and i’m so grateful for your insights and

48:48

and inspirations and ideas thanks for talking to us oh it’s my pleasure and you know i i

48:56

think it is it’s it’s really great that um in a lot of ways that we can do these

49:01

things digitally we’ve been able to collaborate with folks um

49:06

all across the world now that you know i think just culturally wouldn’t have been

49:12

thought of before it was always possible but um

49:17

is is now kind of coming through a lot more and so i’m excited for a lot of the possibilities

49:25

um in the future you know and when we can be in in a space and also digital

49:30

like i think a lot can happen and i really appreciate the invitation to to be a

49:35

part of this it was absolutely our pleasure

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