Feel (in) the gaps. (In)visible disabilities

The Program for Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity & The Centre for the Study of the United States presented:

 

A Virtual Exhibit Tour and Panel Discussion

 

with artists Letícia Barreto, Cinzia Greco, Maica Gugolati, Jaime Lee Loy, and Gabrielle Le Roux.

 

1-3pm

October 3, 2023

William Doo Auditorium

45 Willcocks St.

 

This is was a hybrid event.

 

Feel (in) the Gaps is a continuation of an ongoing discussion and exchange amongst five transnational artists, activists, researchers, and curators who share the experience of having different invisible disabilities. The artists have been meeting regularly online, creating a safe space where they learn about each other’s (in)visibilities and create critically and artistically from it. Within ‘invisible disabilities’ the exhibition included permanent and transient disabilities, such as autoimmune diseases, psychological and neurological conditions, unrecognized or medically unexplained disabilities, chronic diseases, and forms of trauma, with trauma explored both as the consequence of disability and as a disability in itself. When defining disability, and in particular invisible disability, in medical contexts, mistranslation can occur. For this reason, the exhibition promoted dialogism as a methodology of sharing, creating and exhibiting. The exhibit also confronted societal ableism and “toxic positivity” that pressures people to over-perform “feeling fine”; but also it disagrees with the classic iconography of suffering that superficially boxes-in the complexities of knowledge and experiences.  The project rejects the pressure for in/visibly disabled people to camouflage them/ourselves, to imitate and fit in, and to adapt to survive. Feel (in) the Gaps rather insists on surviving ‘through’ and with disabilities, in a form of “through living”, or “through-viving” in partnership with societal challenges. This allows for a different way of living in the world and possibly being recognized by it.

 

 

Letícia Barreto (she/her; Brazil) is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator based in Alverca - Lisbon, Portugal. She is an art teacher at Nextart, in Lisbon, PT. Her artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally since 2000, online and onsite, between Europe, Latin America, and the USA

 

Cinzia Greco (she/her; Italy) is an academic social scientist. She holds a PhD in medical anthropology and is currently a researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK. Cinzia has a longstanding interest in how illness and health are tangled with gender, class and race and how these entanglements define our experiences and the place we occupy in society. Her research has been published in several feminist and medical academic international journals. She is also a co-editor of the French journal Anthropologie & Santé.

 

Maica Gugolati (she/her; Italy) is a multi-based researcher, anthropologist, and philosopher. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology of art and performance and is an affiliated researcher at IMAF, Institute of African Worlds. She is a member of the International Art Curatorial Association: AICA South Caribbean. She curated online and onsite shows and developed experimental collaborative art-research projects in the Caribbean and in the Americas. Her artfieldwork-based projects are exhibited nationally and internationally between Europe, India, the Caribbean region, and Latin America. She published academic and artistic articles. She is a co-editor of Black Diaspora Journal and Caribbean InTransit, a consultant and co-educator at Decolonial Dialogues platform.

 

Jaime Lee Loy (she/her; Trinidad and Tobago) is an artist and writer and a lecturer at the University of West Indies and an art educator at the primary school level. She founded and runs a not-for-profit ‘Summer Heroes’ (2012) an arts-based charitable program that incorporates art therapy approaches and creative development in children, as well as ‘Art with Aunty Jaime,’ teaching art to children. As a writer her fiction has been published by the St Petersburg Review, Akashic Books, NY, and Tongues of the Ocean’s Six Word Stories. Lee Loy is the author of local children’s stories as well as published fiction for adults. Her artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally between Trinidad and Tobago, the USA, and the UK.

 

Gabrielle Le Roux (they them/she her) is a queer, white South African artivist, filmmaker and social justice activist. Spanning more than two decades and three continents, Le Roux has developed a collaborative methodology working with portraits and first-person narratives to celebrate and amplify the voices of people, frequently activists whose lives bring much-needed change to society. Le Roux's projects with activists are shown nationally and internationally in Europe, the African continent, and the Americas.