history

dis assembly emerged from what was formerly named The A Collective, founded by Dr. Estée Klar with her non-speaking son Adam Wolfond, a prose-poet and artist. Since it’s inception, the collective continues to grow with many neurodivergent participants studying, mentoring, thinking, supporting, and creating together.

The A Collective emerged from the exclusion of Wolfond in education and communal life. It is an outgrowth of The A School, which was formed in 2016 in Toronto, Canada, following both the home school and creative school models. Estée and Adam struggled with the segregation of autistic people in Canada, particularly the non-speaking, who also type to communicate, to support and access education and study. Mainstream educational programs continue to be predominantly rooted in white, Western intellectual traditions that privilege speaking, “appropriately” moving bodies. We use the word appropriate - or ableist - as movement, speaking, and “passing” is often described as being “socially appropriate.” This becomes a barrier for those who move differently; autistic people and their movements are described as disordered and are often pathologized.

The school system in Canada aims to rehabilitate and “fix” autistic people in order to become productive members of society, situating value on efficiency and speed; normative forms of time, speech, movement and relation, and also, linear orientation (think factory lines, horizons, straightness, and even lined-up desks - these become assumptions and enforcements of a way of perception and orientation that all humans share). It’s important to think of how these arch-strictures force-to-form bodies, time, relation, thus marginalizing those bodies that don’t fit. And because independence and speech are a large part of the competence imaginary that envisages “the mainstream,” supports are often withheld from autistic people, particularly if that support is dependent on another. We contend that support needs to be relational and consistent, as idiosyncrasies are only understood when people are together for long periods of time. Support also as collaboration is attended to how we influence and respect each other. Ableist assumptions about non-disabled hierarchical dyads must dissolve as bodies move together, create, and influence each other in relation.

Wolfond also contributes to thinking of the non-human as the objects of what he calls “atmospheres” of relation that activate movements. This premise has guided our work as a collective. Support in the rehabilitative sense, in contrast, seems to uphold the very structures, systems, and forms that autistic expression challenges. We continue to challenge the very systems and assumptions that continue to assume autism as disorder and that exclude autistic people. We do so with affirmative inventions and creations for “relanguaging” (Wolfond) and rethinking autism outside a pathology paradigm where the “autism” label was born. Autistic people have reclaimed, revoked, relanguaged autism from non-autistic, mostly clinical and comparative representation of autistic boringness against imagined normatively. Autistic expression, as we study it in various movements, offers alternatives for thinking about diversity and collaboration - slanting, queering - ways of rethinking the human, value, and expression.

As a result of exclusion and oppression, and even despite it, we shifted our earlier work toward an artistic-philosophical process with practices aimed at discovering and supporting the conditions for neurodiversity to emerge and thrive. This process must be ongoing as we deepen understandings and challenge traditional ways of thinking and doing, including how support is always present and collaborative. We have created a number of exhibitions, films, and books to discover how we become neurodiverse together.