Authors:
Leslie G. Roman, rena del pieve gobbi, Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry, Persimmon Blackbridge
Abstract:
How do disability arts (dis/arts) and culture rupture and transform conventional artistic and a/r/tographic practices? We show how disability arts and culture involves a multiplicity of voices unfolding, recursing, rippling and reflexively performing public pedagogy to make the Wingspan retreat of artists and scholars. We revisit both Hofstadter’s formalistic and ahistorical conception of recursion and Irwin’s a/r/tography to ask how artistic practices and genres reflexively transform. Our research foregrounds disability collectivity without forsaking individuality, fragilities, strengths, differences of disability that require accommodation and communication beyond the binaries of ability/disability, and, purported ‘normalcy’ and ‘irregularity’. This article artistically and intellectually plays both with the unfolding of a/r/tography as recursive processes often in tension and contention with discourses of ‘ability’ and ‘normalcy’ that so bind who counts as valued human beings (or not) and whose semiotic excesses matter. Recursive transformations may become larger sociocultural movements of disability politics and collectives with history, agency and polyvocality. To respect such differences and yet exceed them in the span of wings is the provisional and mighty task of the disability arts, culture and public pedagogical movement.