** PLEASE BOOK EACH SESSION YOU WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND, You are invited to attend all three workshops or register for individual sessions **
** The workshops are open to, and welcoming of, people who identify as Disabled and people who identify as non Disabled. **
THE PROGAMME
11.05.2024 | 11.30 - 2.00 PM
Collaborative RestNest Crafting activity
When did you last take 2 hours to prepare to rest? What does your perfect “rest nest” look, sound, feel and smell like? In this session we will use cushions, bean bags, blacknets, lights, and scents to make a “rest nests” for one another and luxuriate in the joy of rest.
11.05.2024 | 2.30 - 4.30 PM
Dancing with paper
You are invited to sculpt and play with giant 5m by 2m tubes of paper by rolling over them, getting inside them, cuddling and dancing with them. While music plays in the background, you are invited to manipulate the paper in whatever ways seem interesting, creatively satisfying and sensorily joyful to you.
12.05.2024 | 11.30 - 2.00 PM
Time Blind Sewing
How long is a piece of embroidery thread? Long enough for 5 minutes of sewing? Long enough for time to unwind? Long enough to create a stealth riot?
In this session attendees will be given 3 threaded needles and two lengths of fabric, using the thread in unconventional ways to explore how time transforms when manipulating materials, both individually and with others. No sewing experience required.
- All activities will begin with a twenty-minute introduction to the research project and consent form, shared by Shakthi. Lady Kitt will be available for 45 mins at the end of the day for a series of 1:1 chats if anyone who has attended any of the sessions needs to talk or debrief individually.with disabilities.
ABOUT
Doing things at speed excludes a vast array of people from services, experiences, communities, spaces and opportunities. Yet many of the institutions which proclaim creativity is ‘for everyone’ are rancid with haste. What might unhurried creativity & research look, feel, sound, taste and smell like? What institutional and cultural change could these embodied slow-ways demand?
Over this weekend, we will be feeling our way through gentle, forthright, mischievous, sensory, collaborative modes of creativity, in ways that disrupt the speedy pace of contemporary work. Expect actions and ideas of craft, pleasure, activism, mess making as social glue and disability justice.
There will be scheduled facilitated activities like: crafting a “rest nest”, time-blind sewing, sound bathing and giant paper sculpting. These will be arranged around frequent rest breaks, time for relaxed chatting & time for self led making. You will be an investigator of your own experience, sharing your thoughts about how craft activities can speed up or slow down our sense of time.
“Crip time” is a term used by some disability rights advocates to describe how disability alters people’s experiences of time. For example, people with disabilities might need time and assistance that is overlooked by capitalist work arrangements that value speed and productivity. “Crip theorists” suggest that capitalist forms of hyper-productivity are harmful for everybody, not just people with disabilities.
Research Project: Critical Crafts
This workshop is part of a research project called Critical Crafts. We are exploring whether arts and crafts are a way for LGBTQ+ people to respond to social science concepts by drawing on their own lived experience. The “social sciences” include all fields of study that examine the behaviour of human beings, past and present, such as history, sociology, economics, psychology, and anthropology.
Some of the most important research in the social sciences has been conducted by LGBTQ+ people based on their own experience of social inequality, such as feminist theories criticising patriarchy, research on queer history and activism, and how capitalism oppresses various minority groups.
We invite you to join us as co-investigators in this journey by sharing how you explore questions of power and social inequality in your daily life, and if you think the social science concepts on these topics are empowering and relevant. We will also explore how arts-based activities can foster critical reflection, engagement with research, political consciousness, and community-building.
This event is supported by a grant from the British Academy, in collaboration with QUEERCIRCLE and Lancaster University.
Disabled installation artist, researcher and drag king Lady Kitt does ‘Mess Making As Social Glue’. Kitt works on long term, collaborative endeavors driven by insatiable curiosity about how art can be useful. Projects are usually punctuated by the creation of large-scale, vibrant installations (or sites for exchange) crafted from recycled paper, reused plastics and raw clay, which Kitt calls shrines.
Kitt’s work has won North East Culture Award 2022, VAMHN Arts Award 2023, been longlisted for 2024 Aesthetica Art Prize, shown at Atlanta Contemporary (USA), Saatchi Gallery (UK) & BALTIC, Gateshead (UK)
Shakthi Nataraj is a Lecturer of Sociology at Lancaster University, an anthropologist, creative writer, and illustrator. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. She illustrates under the name The Artful Anthropologist.