neurodiverse arts co-lab
dis assembly is a collaborative and supportive arts collective dedicated to neurodiversity and affirmative, creative activity to: shifting the field of research creation; supporting conditions for neurodiversity; rethinking support and collaboration; and creating networks of mutual support. We are inventing our own ways of living.
we move
with the premise that experimentation, play, and process is at the heart of experience, creation, and collaboration. We resist the pathology paradigm that characterizes autism as disordered and relanguage for understanding neurodiverse relational connections that are otherwise parsed by neurotypicality.
we think
with art, human and non-human processes, objects, atmospheres, movement, poetry, languaging, philosophy, and critical disability studies - in relation.
we are inspired
by diversity, relation, and creative synergies in a dis assembling world to consider new modes of life and new forms of perception and creation. We move with what emerges and create in materials and media that move in the making.
we wish to “dance”
1 with neurodiverse or neurotypical people who wish for support and access to study through a process of social engagement, creation, and affirmative work
2 for those interested in networks of sustainability for support, education, and care
3 with autistic people, and people who support neurodiversity and diversity-in-diversity, looking for a transdisciplinary, neurodiverse milieu to explore techniques for living neurodiversity and supporting neurodiversity
anti-mission
A mission statement seeks to make permanent a set of goals for our work. We recognize that neurodiversity is a way with processes and techniques emerging through process and relation. Our work requires movement in relation to rethink the concepts of normality that have pressed down on us, forcing us to permanently shape ourselves and our world to neurotypical form.
We resist this fixity with movement.
We think, feel, and touch concepts as transient, grasping toward richer understandings of neurodiversity-in-relation that arrive from experience and collective study, that are nourished by the thoughts of queer and radical disability studies, new materialisms that affect theory.
We are not an arts program.
A program covers a particular field, finds a particular problem, and works toward a particular goal. We are not in the business of rehabilitation or the providing of services for autistic or neurodivergent people, or for parental respite.
We find participation and engagement in whatever forms assemble and emerge among us. This might be: burrowing in a corner under a sheet; fidgeting; moving back and forth; humming-as-annotation (Wolfond); or turning off a Zoom screen as participation happens in more than face-to-face, self-same ways.
Forms of work, shapes, and concepts perpetually dis assemble.
This keeps our work moving, resisting operationalized and goal-oriented programming. This is a movement - our understanding of creation and support shifts over time and as we keep joy and creativity in our bellies.
In thinking of support, we do not hierarchize the relation (support worker-disabled person for example) but understand that collective, mutual care must invent from within, understanding collaboration as mutual.
Play, invention, thinkingfeeling together with artistic processes allow us to feel what emerges in relation. It also provides unique access to learning and collective study through the emergence of diverse and transdisciplinary modes, thus creating our own ways of thinking, research, and creation.
We do not address policy explicitly or aim to transform neurotypical versions of “inclusion” (that are appendages systems to the system that never changes), however, we do recognize how works seeds and resonates across disciplines and interests, bodies and lives.
play
Click on your favourite shape to engage with the collaborative on our experimental website.
our s/pace
Introduction and tour of the studio at Artscape Youngplace with founder and director Dr. Estée Klar.
S/Pace: a film installation, screening and poetry/stick installation at Critical Distance, Toronto on October 3, 2019. Part of the exhibition Access is Love and Love is Complicated. Presented in partnership with Tangled Art+Disability.
