Access Intimacy







Access Intimacy with Mia Mingus, opening contribution by Not a Playground, ASL interpretation and CART, graphic recording by Radical Roadmaps, as part of Wxtch Craft spring cycle: The poisons, the remedies, co-curated with Leana Boven, presented by Studium Generale KABK and Casco Art Institute, 13 May 2021

Writer, community organizer, and disability justice activist Mia Mingus elaborates on “access intimacy” and shares what it can look like in our communities in this first online event. Initially coined on her blog Leaving Evidence in 2011, access intimacy is an “elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else gets your access needs” and a sense of “comfort that your disabled self feels.” This kind of intimacy, considered by Mingus and many from disability communities as “the missing link” across structural limitations of access and community building, paves way for interdependent connections as opposed to isolating, individual circumstances. Access intimacy can extend to class, race, and gender, and make space for the pain and trauma related to other forms and intersections of oppressive experience.

Not a Playground (NAP), a grassroots organization, activist research collective who focuses on collecting and reflecting on institutional critique in the (Dutch) arts/culture/design fields, participates in this session with an opening contribution. Initially formed in protest last September, NAP reflects on their organizing processes as it relates to transformative justice and envisioning for a future regenerated after the burn.


Graphic recording by Radical Roadmaps