access: practices and habits

ongoing

Through the project 'access: practices and habits' our consortium aims to develop accessibility as a creative practice at the heart of our work as arts organizations. Addressing the priority of social inclusion, we depart from the need for small-scale contemporary arts organizations to cultivate better, structural access practices, that are integral to every facet of our work – encompassing our staff, our curatorial practices, and the engagement with our audiences. With this project, we create a shared context to critically reflect on our current ways of working, explore new, more accessible practices to learn new skills, compile a public online resource library, and contribute to structural change and the development of new standards in our sector, through each of our partners’ involvement with different networks of arts organizations, educational institutions and advocacy groups. The partners in our consortium are Askeaton Contemporary Arts (Askeaton, Ireland), Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain), and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) – three arts organizations that base their programs on inquiries into intersectional feminisms, decolonial perspectives, processes of historicization, cultural translation, and social transformation. In ‘access: practices and habits’ we center the knowledge, expertise, artistic work and needs of disabled artists and cultural workers. The project includes a Collaborative Study strand and three commissioned Artistic Research Projects that both run throughout the project’s duration. Our online platform will collect a growing resource library, periodical project updates, and outcomes of the Artistic Research Projects in one digital space. Once the project concludes, this website will remain available as a tool for cultural workers and arts organizations (of a similar scale) to start reviewing and improving the accessibility of their own projects and practices.