Studium Generale Rietveld Academie 2025 – Radical Accessibility: Crip Pedagogies, Crip Theory, Crip Practice
Imagine a museum where we can rest after standing too long.
Where wall texts meet our eye level, not strain our necks.
Where lectures describe the room so we can hear what it looks like.
Where a friend’s shoulder offers pause, and a guard guides, not polices.
Where mumbled words appear on screen, side by side with speech.
Imagine treating our bodies with the same care as the art— welcomed, considered, held.
Imagine entering a space where not just our eyes,
but our whole selves belong.
Thinking from the premise of radical accessibility always evokes a sense of utopian pleasure, as we imagine other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. It is utopian because it refuses to accept the present-day reality and acknowledges that something is missing. [1] Yet at the same time, we’re done with using our imagination for simpler things. I don’t want to imagine a museum space where I can rest my body. I need a museum space where I can rest my body, and that is only the beginning.
This year’s Rietveld Studium Generale, which took place in the Stedelijk Museum, illuminated ways of thinking, creating, feeling and being together, that have long been expressed but remain consistently ignored. Rather than limiting accessibility to medicalized terms and physical accommodations, the default institutional approach, the Studium Generale opened up the social and creative landscape of Crip perspectives. [2] Beyond ramps, sign interpreters, content warnings, and image captions, Crip theory and practice call for infrastructural change through new forms of togetherness and reciprocal care.
Jorinde Seijdel, head of the programme, opened the event by saying: ‘How can we make accessibility a core aspect of our learning, thinking and creating, rather than an afterthought or add-on?’ What followed was a three-day programme filled with wide-ranging presentations and lecture-performances, alongside the parallel exhibition Rietveld Uncut, in which students of the academy showcased their work. The first day ‘The World is Our Corner: Neurodivergent Homelands and Landscapes’ was curated by artist, writer and activist Hamja Ahsan.
Under Ahsan’s wings, we were temporarily flown out to the “Shy People’s Republic of Aspergistan”. Drawing from his book Shy Radicals, a satirical, speculative fiction as well as a personal and political manifesto, Ashan invited us to imagine a society governed by militant neurodiverse and introverted people who revolt against the supremacy of the extravert world order. In this imagined world, an alternative Black Panther Party protests with crossed arms and closed eyes, instead of high-power poses. The symbol of national liberation is a resistance hero reading at the riverside; and the urban landscape is formed around side roads rather than crowded intersections. Ashan’s work ultimately challenges the infrastructure of public space and the hypervisibility of protest signs. If, according to Hannah Arendt, the political is defined by any action performed in public space, then who is granted access and on what terms?
While I was dwelling on these ideas, artist Sarah Browne took the stage to screen Echo’s Bones, a film that she made in collaboration with autistic youth in North County Dublin. The film echoes Samuel Beckett’s eponymous short story, set in that same landscape: a liminal zone between an asylum and the sea. Rather than treating autism as subject matter, Browne let features of autistic language and communication inform her cinematic framework. The result is a heightened sensory experience: some scenes are captured with immense focus, and sounds are emotionally enhanced through subtitles like ‘anxious bird noise’, ‘disappointing thud’. Repetitive speech patterns, word play and wild humour animate the film’s narrative.
Finally, İpek Burçak, a close collaborator of Ashan, presented her artist book The Autistic Turn through a dynamic lecture-performance. Carefully balancing irony, personal storytelling and critique, Burçak formulated how, after the affective turn of the 1990s, an autistic turn is now needed to protect autism from AI technologies that create biased recognition tests and reinforce harmful stereotypes.
The following day, I returned for ‘Unsettling Access: Care, Touch and Institutional Change.’ Here, I got carried away in many different directions. The speakers were not only speaking to us, but they were also speaking with us, through embodied experiences. Undoing the perfection that often comes with conferences, several speakers openly shared their nervousness and reminded everyone to make themselves comfortable in the room. Carolina Calgaro kicked off with a plea for embodied practices in museum spaces. Surely, we bring more than our eyes into the exhibition space: so how have museum infrastructures led us to desensitise ourselves? And how can we rebuild these with building blocks of care?
Artist Elio J. Carranza led an interactive exercise that invited us all to play, feel, and think together. From small packages of clay, we were asked to create real or imaginary sensory aids. Coming up to the stage, everyone could present their creations in front of a live camera, projected on the screen behind them. In every thinkable way, the tools varied in form and purpose: ‘a fidget for my ADHD son,’ ‘a mouth that translates e-mails into forehead kisses,’ ‘a collection of things: so, we remember we don’t have to be unified; we can be fragmented wholes.’
When poet-artist CAConrad entered the stage, I noticed how students in front of me were snuggling up to each other in the bean bag chairs, the room radiating calmness. CAConrad shared a deeply personal story about being sick of living in factory-like conditions, becoming alienated from the body. They illuminated their practice of [soma]tic poetry, an approach to writing that elevates the body and the spirit. We were invited to inhabit the empty spaces between their words, to feel creativity as a vital organ in the body. Through their poetry performance, CAConrad offered a kind of sunrise that lasts all day—inviting warmth to sink into our skin.
Introducing herself as ‘professional spiller, access worker and pleasure seeker,’ Romany Dear brought the day to a close. ‘We have to become word activists,’ she said. Unsettling access begins with a flow of words. Cripping the institution means going beyond the language that we know. It is, in Dear’s words, ‘a new constellation of togetherness’ that emerges from a co-creation of language, not through a shared given.
As I left the Stedelijk’s auditorium that day, I carried with me a sense of joyful disruption, knowing that this conference took place in an institution that, perhaps despite its efforts, still struggles to create equality. I often think back to an e-mail that I wrote to the Stedelijk a year ago, demanding subtitles or transcripts for an exhibition of video art. The reply read: ‘We always approach this from an artistic point of view. This led to the difficult decision that we would not put any subtitles in the works. We can send you the wall texts if you would like to read those again!’. Now, to inhabit this space with a collective of voices and bodies that demands more and otherwise, is to finally consider accessibility as an artistic point of view.
[1]: José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2019), 1.
[2]: Originally used to stigmatize and marginalize people with (visible) disabilities, the term ‘Crip’ has been reclaimed by artists, activists and scholars, akin to the reclaiming of ‘queer’. Reclaiming ‘Crip’ as a definition of self-identity is a way to return the stigma against its verbal offenders and to express pride in being a member of the disability community.
The conference festival of Rietveld’s Studium Generale Radical Accessibility took place on the 19th, 20th and 21st of March at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Information about the program can be found here.
Caitlyn van der Kaap
studeert kunstgeschiedenis en cultural analysis aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam en is redacteur
