Disability Embrace
Primitive Way Country Come Look Inside (2024) was a project that grew from my work with disabled poet Ysolde Stienon. Ysolde lives with a condition called Rett Syndrome. Her access to spoken language is through a computer program called the Tobii. It voices the words and sentences that Ysolde composes by tracking the movements of her eyes.
Ysolde also communicates deeply, eloquently and expressively through the chosen and spontaneous rhythms of her body. The same principles of embodied wisdom that I have honed through my performance work allow me to perceive her innate expression and communication. We primarily communicated through:
❋ Breath
❋ Emotions
❋ Bodily Sensations
❋ Imagination
❋ Embodied Imagery
❋ Pause and Rhythm
The culmination of our work together was published by MIT Press, as part of the special issue of the Leonardo CripTech Incubator.
The three videos below accompany the article.
Video 1: This brief video is an introduction to Ysolde and Marina’s artistic collaboration. Ysolde’s machine-mediated voice was pre-recorded and laid over the video.
The painting process documented here is a record of Ysolde’s bodymind rhythms.
The brushstrokes foreground the way Ysolde’s bodymind speaks and communicates. The brushstrokes are part of Ysolde's voice.
Video 2: This video documents a conversation between Ysolde and Marina where they were reflecting on Ysolde’s experience of being over-medicated. Disability performance artist Petra Kuppers invited Ysolde and Marina to contribute a movement or gesture to her project, the Crip/Mad Achive, that had to do with medical incarceration. Ysolde contributed a gesture of a feeling of freedom from over-medication.
This video is unedited, and the non-verbal embodied communication between Ysolde and Marina, conceptualized as ground-time, is kept in full.
The context for this video is described in greater detail in the article.
Video 3: This video captures a communication moment of improvised response, where Ysolde is responding to the content in Video 2.
This is a vivid example of how Ysolde will combine words and sentences that were programmed into her Communicator for a different purpose (i.e. Philosophy class) and apply them to new situations and contexts.
Marina calls this communication moment a meta-DJ crip magic response mix.
The context for this video is described in greater detail in the article.