»(un)learning bodies« at Württembergischer Kunstverein

Workshop by Ren Loren Britton
Rehearsing technology in trans-crip-technoscientific time

In this workshop, participants will be invited to rehearse crip technoscientific technologies. We will study some histories of political coalitions between trans, crip, and anti-racist movements that have hacked and engaged technology with their own values. The workshop begins with a screening of the video work Coalition Bouquet: 504 Sit-In – this artwork sets the stage for participants to think through, write, tell, and prototype their own stories and experiences through which unlikely technologies have emerged and enabled collaborative work. An example from the Coalition Bouquet film is when, during the 504 Sit-In – a disability-rights protests that took place in the United States in 1977 – a medicine cooling refrigerator was created from a cardboard box, an air-conditioning unit, and tape. In this workshop we will take a wide perspective on technology and zoom in to the technological artifacts that may have otherwise been invisibilized in our stories about working across differences.

Questioning which practices become historicized or canonized as the »right« pasts to refer to, this workshop will invite participants to remember lesser historicized stories of when things have gone well between disabled, racialized, queer, lower class, and otherwise othered coalitions. Together we will closely explore the hacked, invented, and prototyped improvisational technologies that have been invented to support coalitional groups. Examining the hirstory of the 504 Sit-In, telling a story about the CIL (Center for Independent Living) Activists and the BPP (Black Panther Party); exploring the work of Giuseppe Campuzano and their DNI (De Natura Incertus) project (zooming in to holographic lenticular printing techniques); and taking examples from stories shared in the group, we will explore memory, and practice prototyping technologies that open spaces and possibilities to render the probable possible.

Participants: max. 20 in-person, max. 10 remote

Access copies including prescripted parts of the workshop will be handed out in English and German.

Ren Loren Britton is a trans*disciplinary artist-designer who holds values that reverberate with trans*feminism, technosciences, radical pedagogy, and disability justice. With loving accountability, their work practices collaboration, accessibility, trans*gender politics, and critical technical praxis.

Lecture Performances by Luzia Prado among others

Crip
The term »crip« was adapted and reworked from its origin in the derogatory word »cripple.« The term should only be used with permission from the community or person who is being referred to, or regarding crip theory and practice. There is discussion about whether crip refers only to the physical disability community, or other experiences as well.
(adapted from the Critical Disability Studies Collective, University of Minnesota https://cdsc.umn.edu/cds/terms)

Crip theory
Made popular by scholars like Robert McRuer and Carrie Sandahl, »Crip theory« as an academic field derives from critical disability studies and merges with queer theory. Crip theory explores how the social pressures and norms around ability intersect with the social pressures and norms around gender/sexuality. Crip theory and practice entails sustained forms of coming out and recognizes that a more accessible world is possible, one in which disability doesn’t contest liberationist notions of acceptance and tolerance.

Crip technoscience
Crip technoscience offers a potential clarification to the limitations of Assistive Technology productions and to systems that marginalize non-normative body-minds as pointed out in the »Crip Technoscience Manifesto« (2019). Acknowledging that military-industrial research and development, imperial and colonial relations and ecological destruction produced technologies that have enabled disabled people to gain access to the social world, Haimraie and Fritsch claim nevertheless that technoscience can be a transformative tool for disability justice.2 Crip technoscience harkens back to Feminist technoscience and other forms of technoscience, or »critical knowing-making«: 1) pursuing liberation and community care. The »making« here can involve practices of critique, alteration, reinvention, and creation, but it can also involve dismantling and »world-remaking« in the face of an oppressive status quo.