Disabled Legacies: Beyond Access and Inclusion (March) | Third Panel (Day 2)

[bell] Good afternoon everyone. Welcome back. Um my name is Sandy. I am going to introduce our amazing speakers for this afternoon. Um in the spirit of disability culture, feel free to join us on the floor. um if that's accessible to you, stretch your legs and if you want to do some yoga or stretches in the back, you are more than welcome to do so. All right. So, first we are going to have um Karani Baroa Oka, writer, artist and editor from Jakarta based in London. Oka's work has been presented widely internationally and centers disability justice as anti-colonial practice, access as translation and environmental justice. Thank you so much Sandy. Hello everyone. Um same [laughter] I'm Oka. I'm very happy to be here. Um, we were talking about the necess how necessary it is to self-describe earlier and I just want David to know that I'm on the floor on a really bright blue bean bag. [laughter] This is called bean bag work. You know, you can it's it's a it's an ancient practice. Um, and I'm an Indonesian woman wearing a multicolored uh Southeast Asian dress that my cousin gave me who is also part of our cry community. So on the screen is a slide with the title of my talk on being uncapturable cry ancestral escapes from the archives as future liberation. It was unplanned that I would be on the floor. I'm on the floor because I am in flare. I am in warning flare. And I am reminding myself that that means I am in escape. And I will speak about what that means and why that is. And the fact that I am in escape is because I am in [ __ ] community. Currently I am in a space where I have amazing support um and people who are okay with me performing on a bean bag who provide the bean bag and I won't say who gave me pain meds earlier but thank you Lord. Um oh my god. Um [laughter] so um this is an escape story and this is a story that involves all of you in this room and online. Uh this is an escape story is the first line of this book that I'm holding up. It's got a pink cover. It's called Anna Infinite. So what I'm talking about is the Anna Infinite project which I've just realized I've been calling a 14-year art and writing project but it isn't that. It isn't even the book or the art, some of which is in the book that came out of it, but it's a survival project. And by that I mean without this project, I would literally not be alive here today and with you all. And that is how your presence today all of you is very meaningful to me and how you are part of this story. And as I speak, I would like us to think about um a few sentences that I have in the next slide, which is um uh there's a squig a large squiggly abstract doodle in red on the right hand side connected to um punctuation in uh two sentences that I wrote down in black and red. And this is a still from uh my performance lecture, Caption and Red Thread. Let me get my uh Okay, assist phone. Caption and Red Thread: Deaf and Disabled Narratives in the African Caribbean, Asian and African Art in Britain archive. So, as Sandy mentioned, I work a lot with accesses translation. So, this performance lecture is a video and the caption for it is a paper. Um, uh, I worked with the UL archives. um where I then went on to serve on the board for archives and special collections until um their connections with uh genocidal funding became too much for me to to bear. Um so these sentences say what policies by municipality or nation state or university or one's own family prevent people from disclosing deafness and or disability and a world where colonial capitalist abbleism requires subtuge for survival. Subtterfuge that may threaten our lives for instance by not making ourselves available to care as much as preserve them. And I think everyone here knows what it's like to go into a meeting with a headache or period pains and not necessarily disclose. To go into a work setting or a social setting with anxiety and not necessarily disclose. Um these sentences apply to all of us. Um there will be some fun talk of prolonged medical and social neglect in my life. So let me just try to give you a warning about the nature of this content in a casual voice like real casual like a happy golucky voice. So for example, trauma Um, and studies have shown that this voice significantly lightens the mood. This presentation won't be a retrospective of what I've done since I took the initially quite scary plunge of identifying as an artist in 2009 and the life-changing lifeaffirming action that was googling upon becoming physically disabled in 2011 disabled artists because somewhere in the haze of extreme constant and untreated pain um as a result of a gray cloud a lightning rod I realized that I had become one had become a disabled artist and actually gradually realized I had always been one [laughter] since childhood as is the case for so many of us in terms of neurodeiversity and then later mental um health uh identities. So rather this presentation will be a bit about the project that allowed everything I've done as an artist and writer to take place including being part of and trying to contribute to the nurturing of cry community. So getting a bit meta, this [laughter] this amazing conference in March and February has been a bit of an intervention, it turns out, as it's been so wonderful for um PMC to allow uh me to meet so many people I've known for so many years, but a bunch of them have said, "Girl, get your [ __ ] together. Why? I've I've seen so much of your large scale work since like the 2010s. Like, where is it on your website?" Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. So, yes, this is the year that I apply for funding to get access help to properly archive um on my website. But part of why I've been a that has been delayed in cryp time is that a lot of the art I've created since 2009 has been in a void of belief in community. Um a lot of it has been about performing disability in spaces that exacerbated um the pain of disability um and not access that celebrates it. Um, and with complex PTSD, a lot of my past work has honestly been hard to look at. Um, but what has allowed me to look at it finally is the creation of this book, Anna Infinite. So, some of my work since 2011 has included authoring and illustrating more pickable five soul authored books, including this one, mostly poetry, plus two co-edited books, including stairs and whispers, deaf and disabled poets right back, which was the first anthology in the UK entirely edited by disabled people and deaf people, and only included deaf and disabled people. um including many wonderful friends like yeah Abby Palmer um and many others uh uh Daniel Summan and Sandra Allen were my wonderful co-editors uh one woman theater shows performance installations performance lectures large scale digital collage and films and all of this is this little tale of like girl why haven't you gotten your [ __ ] together and [laughter] actually put a lot of it uh online is the fact that um in nearly 11 years living here in the UK Even on um after my student visa, an extraordinary talent visa, I was not eligible for public funds. I only became eligible for public funds last year. Um and so all of this work in any case has been done as a form of escape, as a prayer that I would one day escape. So, in 2011, I learned at this in the same summer that I was um I just finished doing my scholarship masters at NYU and then the graycloud, the lightning rod, paralyzation um that I learned motor skills-wise out of and um extreme continuous pain. In that same summer, I was reading online and I learned about the existence of the painting on the slide on the left, Anela Javanz by Paul Gogan, who is an [ __ ] and a predator. Um, what a dick. So, so Anela Javan or Anna the Javanese really struck me. It's a it's a nude painting of um a young very young person with earrings, a feminine presenting body, and a monkey at their feet. Um, and on the right hand side is a photo of the supposed person in real life with their hands across their chest just like protect me, protect me, protect me with three um, male artists including Rudolph Morazzek uh, and Paul Gogan who's on the very left. And it struck me in reading about this that nobody writing about this painting was actually Javanese and I'm Javanese, [laughter] you know. So I thought, okay, this is not representation matters. this is I this is not [laughter] what is going on here. Um and so in this absence of cry community of access tools and materials and language just a void of how to save myself and a void of belief which is why Jamisha's work uh prior is so um strikingly relatable. I um like the arter that I am drew to friends in the archives and Anna's because it immediately struck me that same summer. Okay, here's another Japanese person who was very likely in pain and disbelieved. There is the possibility of pain in every picture, in every image, in every human that we meet. And it is colonial ableist visual cultures that has trained us to think of people as non-disabled before we think of them as disabled. Right. Um and uh that is a very simple assertion but it is what you know eventually um in an effort to get funding for this this book I had in my mind called Anna infinite I came to the UK to do a PhD by practice in visual cultures also practiceled like David's PhD um at Goldsmiths um and I was able to do a bunch of performance installations and digital collages about these Anna um and I say Annas because at the be this is another slide with a page page at the beginning of the book. Anna Anna is a name that in Bahasa Indonesia or Indonesian can mean one Anna or multiple Annas as any noun in the singular in Indonesian can also mean that noun is plural. Kuri can mean chair or chairs. Disabled humania disabilas can mean one human or many humans. And so I created infinite. You know that do you know that meme of the guy from its sunny in Philadelphia with a corkboard and the red string? That was me for 14 years. I just iterated and iterated and iterated and iterated on this one painting and science fictional possibilities for these Annas and Anna saving themselves and I was trying to save myself. Um and alongside I was I was writing these books that would help me refine the book Anna Infinite. So this is um an excerpt from my book Amok uh 2024. Uh playing with access as translation. I would like you to know that the entire book of Amok is a caption and is is a caption is a translation of the word ammuk which is the Indonesian and Malay word for rage. And in the late 17th century Dutch, Danish, Portuguese and English dictionaries absorbed it into run a mock or a mock psychopathizing primarily Malay Muslim men. um and uh stifling antic-colonial struggle. So the whole book of poetry is my translation of of ammok. So this reads in brackets bahasaku bahasaku bahasaku bahasaku my language my language my language my language and this is another um page from it in praise of and many scattered brackets and different um thicknesses in praise of brackets. To enter the Indonesian language is a science fictional enterprise. It is a universe of speculative words, gestures, perception. This work is a move to remind ourselves of this of these chronotypes. Indonesia, not Bahasa, which simply means language. But Bahasa Indonesia has no tenses. Thus, all translations into English where past or present or future must be pinned down as definite are both potentially right and always wrong. A reductive tense cannot encapsulate the speculative nature of our language, the science fictional possibilities, destabilizations. And this is, of course, not to mention the other different linguistic cosmologies in the archipelago, over 700 other languages and ways in which neurons enhance possibilities beyond modernity's fixity, personnicity, predilction for pinning down, linguistic cosmology, how stars move and imprint upon the body. Um so plunged into a void of belief and of true believing cry community um creating this project and being processoriented is how I got out. I would like you all to think about an instance in your life and if if it hasn't happened I'm grateful. um in which the first line of this poem uh was said to you. What is it on a scale of one to 10? Is it aching, burning, raw, enraged and radiating, agonizing, stinging, stabbing? Is it separating? Does it feel like a carcass under two towns of meat pounder up and down eternity and apex of weight? Is it mother's arm in the night? The color of Langzad, glowing radioactive as a Chevy truck arrives and crushes it, grates it to the asphalt, sparing only her rings. Is it the mouth of a gash? Sing it like a scream. Who is invisible in there? Is it malingering? Is it attention you gouge out of knees to bring them to the floor joints and flesh uncertain of the stage cues? Which act of empathy, fumbling all the world's pity and disinterest and love disguised or amplified in all the same trembling size? Is it the neighbor man reaching his hand inside pinning you beady eye just when you catch him in the door? Was that a nightmare? Is it her face? Is it his? Is it their legs in your covers? And wondering which of these many weak bodies is weaker than yours? Who could you get more pleasure from? And which of their open wounds? Is it a wound? Is it a blister, a bruise, a boil, a pimple, an inrone curse from an ancestor thick in the face and spitting through the eons, heckling at your flesh to carve in it? Did it begin when you turned the corner and the street lights came on and a cloud looked a lot like that road dweller you pass and everything became a cloud and you passed out? Was it in the bathtub? Was it in the cubicle or in the lap of a terrified stranger at the point of a revolver? Because this man is not what his mama always thought he would be. And this is money, kid. This is money. And I will pay you to shut the doors of hollering grief for good. If you eat this, swallow this, believe in these studies. This is antidote ethereal. This will stop a world of grief and the need to speak it. I love you. I manufacture these compounds in a heart grafted of selflessness and cashmere concern. Sugar in my giving veins. Just sugar, baby. How are you telling me you haven't heard about the mortgage like a noose in my own father's slit in the chest? You think it comes free? Is it squares on a board you were born into that began with spices and trading ships and men in peaked headgear who terrorized your ancestors chickens and worse so much worse you feel the sickening of history like a plague in all your parts and this came from my friend in school miss caught it from him hysterical disease are you saying colonialism didn't give you the flu or you just trying to get him into detention must be going around must be terror so dark it spits void must be a needle in the lower eyelid going through the cheekbone must be the eat. We are shedding so much of our baby faces. We are falling apart under all of our eyes. I mean, really disintegrating. No wonder muscles are always breaking down. This is a planet of slow and hell if you were human skin. Now, is it dermatological or can you feel it in the bone? I honestly can't hear your answers. Girl, are you dancing to show you can still make the party or was that a spasm or are you being clever? What are these bales of letters on your tongue when all I want to know is a number? Um, so that was part of a onewoman show I toured around uh called Even Marrier Having Coffee. And because doctors had told myself and my family for years that there was no medication that could help me at all, I was completely unmedicated for at least four years. Um, touring this show about how people can't see and believe my pain and not even thinking to go to a GP in any of these countries. I toured the show in like Vienna, Edinburgh festival, like I just assumed the doctors were correct and they were not. Um, because I had a history of depression and anxiety, of course, because I was a brown woman. Of course, this was all in my mind. Um, and then I decided to cross oceans like Anna and I decided to move to the UK and try to get research funding to finish this goddamn book. Um, so this book contains many multitudes of Anna. Here's Anna number 45 on the water. I went to sit far by the river as the river is also the ocean as marine goddess Neroidul came and took me in her arms as a cauldron of fear in a dream telling of such things that I now know. And currently he is napping so I may open into the sun. Napping as a prerequisite for busy waves in miniature and fervent against my ankles. They say this liquid is the sen and I say it is the Java Sea. Oil rises thick to the top. Against banks I swim deep. There's the possibility of pain in every picture. And every archive is a disabled archive because it has never been safe fully for people especially from the global majority to declare disability. disbelief is an infrastructure and so is belief. So I started um doing these performance installations about the Annas. Um this is a a slide showing uh one of those I did called Selected Annas um in Saltz Basel in Switzerland in 2018. Uh behind me is work by Banu Capil who I love because it was a duo show um but I also exhibited several um digital collages on the other side of the gallery. Um uh this and the following photos in the next slide are from a performance installation I did called ananlature at the A. So there are two projections. So on the wall is a basically essentially a short film that I made consisting of digital collages and various forms of media um time to my performance that I am doing from within. the second projection which is from above and it is an outline of a version. I made many many versions of the painting and I'm performing from within that outline and I'm reinscribing that outline in the chalk in chalk on the gallery floor. And here's another slide with another such um uh um digital collage slash uh um digital artwork which is also in your booklets. Um uh here's one talking about how the age of consent in France uh at the time was 13 and that is why Anna is always described of as being 13. There's so much more I could say about this historical figure. Um and I'm I'm looking forward to sharing more with you uh and having conversations about it. And I connect Anna's uh condition and probable stories to the way Southeast Asian women, girls, and non-binary people are still um largely disenfranchised as domestic workers and in migration cycles um around the world. Here's some more photos of me inscribing in chalk because institutions weirdly display anticolonial work, but are also a part of colonial work. [snorts] Um I like performing barefoot. There's like a picture of my feet. Maybe I should like for money just like put it on like you know. Um anyway I'm kidding. Um here is that here's here's that digital collage in your book list and it's basically it's part of one of my imaginings of like what if there's like a this purple giant alien Anna who like is trying to erase and erase and erase the forms that that image has been presented in the world. Um and all along as I was doing this um I was learning that pain is a warning system that is holy. It's so funny what Jisha said earlier in her film because I'm also saying it is my most intimate friend of me and most vicious form of reminder to self. It is my body mind screaming for help. So I must pay attention to it. I must respect it and not in the inspirational token way abled folk might think because God knows we hate people who say it was all worth it of our horrible suffering. But I must thank it. I thank my pain for being my messenger and message because it is my body mind and because all of our body minds consist of ancestors and parts of all of their DNA is somehow in us. Pain is quite literally my grandmother say who just before she passed said to my aunt tell Oka not to get too tired. Um, it is quite literally my other grandmother, my grandmother Yutney, who was the first generation of native girls to um be allowed to graduate from high school. And there was a photo of her cohort of school in her bedroom until the very end. I know I'm running a little late. Sorry, I'm just going to uh wrap up in a bit. Um, and who therefore modeled for me what Javanese girls really look like, learning together and in loving friendship. It is this understanding that has enabled me as a filmmaker to be a maker of images of my people as I see them. [snorts] So this is a still of Balisma and it's part of um a short film series I was able to shoot in Jakarta last year called Kokan Paul um and it is uh there's an Iraqi artist who came to the launch um in Birmingham and said, "Oh, these are anti-gods." And I said, "Exactly. These are [snorts] anti- goods." So they're in Japanese clothing and they're cutting turmeric and the cityscape is just so tiny. um because uh they are what really matter and this is part of cry intimacies. Um turmeric is used in many healing um uh uh concoctions in Indonesia. There are still people in my life, many people who I love in some way who do not believe me to ever have been in severe or acute pain or illness even as I have been in level 10 out of 10 pain medical emergency in front of them. This is chilling to me. But I choose to turn away from this and towards the sunlight of cry community of where real love is found in my life and the wisdom of realization. Escape is not a destination. It is a process. It is a form of love and it has always been here because Anna's are inherently multiple in Indonesian language. There are always possibilities that many of them escaped. And because time has no tenses, we are living in the past and present and future. Escape has always been here. We are ancestors escapes and they are ours. Escape is therefore co-constitutive. Escape is therefore ancestrally co-created and co-created by our descendants as well as by our many possible selves. And I'm just going to read this final thing. I hope it's okay. Um I'm really looking forward to hearing [snorts] what Kek says. Okay. Um actually I'm just going to read it from the book. All right. This is what pain does. It's a discombobulating thing. Um I think I'm just gonna call my pain combab. Kabu. That sounds like a pretty nice name. Okay. Um I also am calling the bean bag bamb bam. I hope that the building center is okay with that. All right. So this is the very short chapter because there are many short chapters in this book. Anna number 333,333,333 and me. What would it take to be all right on this canvas? Give myself a blanket. Break myself a family of the world's warm slab of families. Procure the lack of a need for company or smiling mouth while naked. Adopt the monkey or set her free. I will let myself lie down. Haha. Ma breathe soft and deeply leaves in my hair. Make myself jamu. The medicinal drinks for every ailment. be discovered by a jamu seller slinging wears on her back with a cloth. Let her treat me with kindness. Let her say she'll come back in a week to see how I'm doing. And it's lucky my family is here. That I broke off of a slab of the world's known families. The world won't die unless it's painted on. Get moon [snorts] and you get sun. Give me a way to play chunk clack with someone and I will. Go give me a way to spin tops. I rip games out from the painting fabric. Then conjure myself back into a place where other children make sense. Where everything is a piece of music meant to prolong an age of still smallness growing. Thank you. Right. Um, we go into the next presenter and then come back for some Q&A at the end. Okay. All right. So, Next we have um Panal Panala, sorry, Palana K. I apologize for um pronouncing your name badly. Um interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across performance, writing, facilitation, and public engagement. Grounded in disability theory and Samoa concepts of relationality, her work explores access, care and alternative temporalities through embodied and textbased practices. Emma and Mana Kakoto. My name is Bill Brown and I'm delighted to be with you here today streaming in to add to the ideas and conversations that have been swirling across um the events. It was really beautiful to listen to your presentation, Oka, and there's lots of nice um connections across our work. Um thank you to the organizers for having me today. I'm a light brown skinned woman zooming in from my house, zooming in from Oakland. It's 4 am or nearly 4:00 a.m. So, um I am kind of here. I've kind of landed maybe. Um I've got kind of a shaggy mullet haircut and long brown uh uh a long red earrings and I have um I'm zooming in from my office and I have bookshelves just behind me. So, today I'm talking about interstitial overlaps. It's always interesting. you always name the title of your presentation before you actually make the presentation. So um uh yeah and but when I thought about it I've always been fascinated by the in between. My practice regardless of medium is grounded within the concept of the va. So va means relationality and sour. My practice is also thinking about the intersections that connect with different disability concepts like cryp time body mind and access aesthetics. And thinking about today, I wanted to talk about those throwaway remarks which often stay in your mind and then bubble up uh and resurface later and often end up changing your course of direction or your or your thinking. I wanted to think about the gaps in a story where you might need to piece together a new story or fashion a new language to create this story. Um, so I'm going to read to you an essay because I knew that I was zooming in at this time. I didn't feel like my brain could do a slide presentation. So I'm going to read to you um an essay that I wrote as part of a wider collection, a book that was published a couple of years ago called Pacific Arts Alteor. It's the first book of its kind mapping the waves of Pacific art making in Alteor, but also with the artists themselves telling their own stories. I have three essays in the book, but the one that I'm going to read to you about, I was commissioned by the editor, Lana Lopeesi, to write one about disability art and Pacific artists. I knew that there would be two other disabled artists writing about their own work. And I read their essays. both did a fantastic job of telling their stories and advocating for disability rights in Alteor New Zealand. So I thought about what was missing or what story wasn't being told. So this is the essay that I wrote in response to or from this place of thinking about the opportunity, the gap, the in between to write a new story. So just an access note that there are many Pacific or Maui words but I will do a simple English translation. Uh, and then there is one word that you'll hear often, Moana. It is the reference to the ocean. So, Moana of the Pacific. It is also a shorthand for people of the Pacific or people of the Moana or the ocean. So, the essay, so the essay is called, what if Maui was disabled? I was sitting in a virtual fakapi a closing and the koma or elder of the manafeninoa people of that land said two things that surprised and delighted me. First that all who faka papapa have genealogy to the takutimu waka come from savi and as a sorn person from savi I was stoked to hear this and to have our navigator prowess affirmed. Second, he said something even better. He spoke about Maui, world famous in Alteor was a child who grew up lonely as he was chronically ill and disabled. I came away from the fuckapy closing amused and invigorated. I hadn't thought about this moment since then, but as I sit in Brooklyn writing this essay almost a year later, this memory now jumps out at me. I quickly texted my friend and colleague who was there to confirm and he replied yes. Maui was left-handed and he had a club foot. My interest has peaked. Then I furiously did a Google search. Maui demigod plus disability [clears throat] minus Disney. Just a note I am talking about the Maui that is referenced in the disability. I'm not in the Disney movie Moana. I couldn't find any books or articles that referenced his disability. However, I could find hints of him having a different physicality. He is almost always referenced as the smallest of his ch of his parents' children and as being left to die by his mother. Some even say he started life as a blood clot, rescued instead by Arur gods. Reading between the lines, these passing details suggest to me that Maui could very much had have grown up with a disability. As any writer might, when they can't find a visible story, we begin to tell a new one. I imagine instead what it might mean if one of our most innovative forces was disabled. I remember in primary school when I saw a picture of Maui. It is one of my earliest memories of seeing a depiction of a brown figure in a book. The visual images of the strong life brown boy man and his top knot slowing down the sun. A hero. Maui seems to have an inferiority complex and need to prove himself as worthy, sometimes physically against his brothers. As I start to ponder this idea and read about his exploits and ingenuity, his quick-wittedness reminds me of the need to quickly problem solve difficult situations, an important skill for disabled people, as well as the usefulness of wit and humor to navigate the sea of stupidity, avoidance, and barriers we encounter. I started to wonder what if his fish hook was an assisted device to help him with his life and work as a mischievous god. Now, I'm not trying to say that my cane has magic powers, but it does support me to navigate the world in ways I couldn't do alone. Maui is the most human or fallible of the gods, too. He is foolish, impulsive, sly and clever and always upending expectations of others which makes me love this reimagining more and I see these parts of myself in him. I resonate with this person. This felt like the beginning of an exciting provocation. Where else can I find evidence of disability in our stories? So in Samour there is of course Taimar and Tilafa conjoined twins connected by their backs who swam across the ocean from the island of Fiji to the island of Samour to receive the gifts of knowledge of Tatau of tattooing. Taimar and Tilafar's journey irrevocably impacted our sour culture through this important knowledge acquisition the ceremony of receiving beta and malu. So that's the tattoo that women and men uh receive its sacred marks and the mana or prestige and respect that it holds together. They further changed the course of history when upon diving deeper into the water to see a large clamshell. They became confused. The chant they had received to remember the tatal tattoo ceremony became inverted. What was first given to women by women, they changed to given to men by men. So from then on, Tatal became known as a maledominated practice. Another event occurred on the seminal journey. They became separated when a branch hit their backs on their return. This trip across to receive new knowledge physically changed them and can be witnessed by the separation they experienced. We still have these ancestral connections seen in the relationship with a sore someone who receives their marks at the same time as you who crosses with you during this physical and spiritual change. I always like to think it is in difference to these sisters and their disabled once joined bodies. These two figures are foundational in our stories around mark making and which is integral to our identity. But I have never seen or heard any commentary that they are disabled. They just are. Ta and Tilfanga also generated powerful lineages. Nafanua, the all powerful goddess of war, was Tilafanga's daughter, born as a blood clot, which was buried into the earth. Nafanua emerged later as an adult woman, a fierce warrior, leader, and still an influ influential figure in Samour today. These are remnants of there are remnants of these stories of disability that are deep in our culture that we though we might not speak about it in those terms. I cannot imagine what our culture would be like without these two integral women. When I have traveled to Samour I have seen disability as something that is hidden. Family members often protected lovingly by families but also relegated to the background. What would a Moanaentric understanding of disability in all its glory and nuance look like? What roles did disabled Tangata Moana, so people of the sea, play pre-colonization? How can we reimagine our roles so that we have agency and respect? This question is hard to decipher with much of our earlier history lost or reliant on storytelling. As a diasporic sour, I have to rely on the fragments I can find in journals written by those who colonized us. In this investigation, I can only be grateful for whatever has survived. Further reading leads me to Mafi, god of earthquakes. Mafi lived beneath the earth's surface and the volcanic regions below. And when he was angry, he grasped and shook the pillar that supported the earth, causing earthquakes below. He had access to fire until Titanga, so he's actually a version of Mawi in Sam culture or another name for him, came down and twisted one of his arms off. Sams were grateful for this as it meant earthquakes were less aggressive on account of him having one arm to grasp and shake with. This history of disability is hard to find recorded in literature. The text kapo so blind mai in the ancient world asks similar questions. Is it even possible to find this legibility in literature from an oral culture? The text does a brilliant job of delicately weaving cordidor so conversations and stories and text to trace a faka papa a genealogy for blind gods in ancient tamari in the mai world view. Similar to our stories, their blindness was acknowledged but not discussed. And this is a quote from some research. In some mythology, ko was not seen negatively, but a touhu, a sign of greatness. Being ko or blind was a source of power because they were not reliant on all of their senses and and had sharpened others. Through oral stories and some written references, these wahime, these women have traced a faka papa for Mai Kapoor in their mythology. There is Maui's grandparent Mura Ranga Finoa who gifted their jawbone to Maui so he could create the fish hook that then would be used to fish up so the north island in this show of his ability to his skeptical brothers. Muradanga Feninoa was held in high esteem for their knowledge and wisdom in Tal Mai in the Mai world as these qualities reside in the jawbone. Maui knew that this was the tool that would make his mission successful. So it is from a disabled grandparent that Maui receives his knowledge and changes the landscape of Alteor. Maybe his fish h his fish hook can be seen as an assisted device after all. one of wisdom from an elder uh a disabled elder. Where can we situate the disabled Moana body in our vast world of art making, mark making and storytelling? We have always had disabled people in our communities. They have held leadership positions and being changemaking artists. We already have a deep understanding of community and the belief that we are a unit that supports in service and always in relationship to our family. We often personally tend to our family members and live with our elderly parents. We recognize that our roles may change within our families and this is often dictated by our age and bodies. We are also conscious of what it's like to be otherred because of being brown, too brown, not white enough, fat, too fat, too skinny, having chicken legs, taro thighs, big hair. Disability is just another part of this ali otherness and alienation. How can we fashion a place for ourselves? So sometimes throwaway remarks can bubble up, resurface, and have you chasing a whole new dimension that you never thought about before. It's amazing how these moments can change your course or way of thinking. So for me, the in between the gaps or intercesses are powerful places to work within and tell stories from. Thank you so much for listening and for having me. [applause] Thank you, K. All right. So, let's um open the floor for any questions or burning desires to have a conversation with the um our amazing speakers. And there will be mics passing around in the room. We have um we have a we have someone up here. Well, I'm really sorry I missed the very beginning of your speech. Um, but I [clears throat] loved it and I wanted to say well I'm especially interested in the fact that there's no tenses and I would maybe this is the wrong place to ask you maybe because you can say tons about this and I just I want to hear more about that if that's possible. >> Oh, thank you so much. Um, >> thank you so much for your for your presentation. It was really excellent information. >> Thank you so much. Um uh I don't make crying during presentations a professional, you know, um [laughter] [gasps] a professional habit. Um so thank you for bearing with us. I I want to say thank you so much to Kek. One thing I didn't say ke that um in my presentation is that uh in Japanese culture we actually have disabled gods. And it was my colleague Slamat Ax Tohari who is a disabled sociologist who taught me as always it's cry community who teaches you right it's like listen they've always been a part of our culture um and slammed wrote this uh masc uh wrote this book uh called disability in Java about how um Dutch medical hospitals and colonization um introduced the medical model on mass and uh obliterated basically nearly um uh Japanese disability justice cultures. But when we think about the past as the present and as the future, we think about how um resistance has always been there, disability has always been there and disability echoing Salem and Cyrus from yesterday will also exist in the future along with [laughter] um um along with you know I mean in the near future certainly anti-disability efforts are still ongoing um and there is a sense in which um you know to say we live. Kamihid is like we lived, we live and we will live. There's a continuity there and that's a there's a promise there for disabled survival. Um that is wisdom within the language. Um yeah. All right. Thank you. Um we may have we may probably have time for only one more question and then we'll move to break. >> Uh yeah. Hi uh Dave David here just want to echo my thanks to Oka uh of both the speakers but um and it's to I just want to um go back to the idea of Anna which uh you spoke of quite a lot and um I'm just intrigued about that because I've come across that prefix to mean uh beyond but I think your um use of it is is is different. I just wondered if you could just expand on that a little bit please. >> Um yeah so Anela Javanz is is the title of the painting and there was supposed is of um a brown figure that was called Anala Javanes. Um but what I discovered in my PhD research is that while all these bioapes of Gogan were very specific about the details of his life um in minutia uh they couldn't even agree on the ethnicity of this figure. So Anna in various history books is described as being um half Japanese, half Dutch, half Indian, half Malay, Sinhal, Polynesian. And I actually had to go to the Tate and say like you're labeling this as Polynesian girl. That's interesting, you know. And so um it's like uh pick a brown, any brown. And so I think um part of the Anna's project is like an expansive understanding of who could possib who this could possibly be, what ethnicities they could possibly be. And there's kind of a solidarity in that amongst like brown people who are often mistaken for other brown people. Um but also bringing in the specificity of like what does Javanese actually mean? Um but yeah um and and I I I think like I I I was struck K by your talk about Moana and um there's kind of a weird because Anna is in the word Moana. There's kind of like a I feel like Anna solidarity with Moana in a way. >> Yeah, totally. >> Yeah. So, I guess this is my question to you if that's okay. [laughter] Um [snorts] about um do you see uh Moana's and and Maui's um uh and how they're portrayed with regards to disability or assumption of disability or assumption of lack of disability? Um, do you see that as as something that um can be expanded in your culture through storytelling and how? >> Yeah, I definitely think so. I don't think um I think that um yeah, I haven't heard other people talk about Maui as a um as a disabled person. and you know the Disney version of him is like that he's this really tall broad um huge like you know stature person but um in the uh the in the um images of him he actually is depicted as quite a small scorny person and so it was just funny that I was um doing this work where I had to travel AC around Alteora um and we were in a lockdown period so we were doing it in zooms and this um elder from one of the areas that we went to. He just he I don't know why maybe because I was there he talked about it. I'm you know when it's I'm not quite sure but he um yeah he just kind of talked very casually about how Maui was chronically ill and disabled and and that everyone kind of knew this and so when I texted my colleague he's um quite a respected figure in the Marti world and he um kind of uh affirmed it. And then I also thought it was really funny that he said he was left-handed. And I think there's been a long history of the of left. Um even in s culture when you the word for left and the word for right, the word for right is like um uh it's correct. And the word for left is uh it's the second half of that word val means like stupid. And so I just even in our languages we've had this long history I think across cultures around like the left hand and the right hand or you know um and so yeah I think it can definitely be expanded upon um and I think it's just that thing of talking to people and having conversations and then see what kind of bubbles up cuz uh yeah the elder was kind of talking about it in a very matterofact way but I've never heard this story before and then and then I was really stressed about publishing this in a book that was kind of a Pacific arts altered or like what's the history and so I sent it to another writer um who's very well respected to be like is it okay to publish something like this like I've just made the story up like it could be true but it couldn't be true like I've kind of pieced it together and she was like it's totally fine and I think that's part of our role right as um as artists is kind of um yeah creating uh new stories or kind of um putting these uh connections together but um yeah I think uh yeah I haven't seen anyone else talk about it in this way but I think that that will grow and have you know need time and yeah >> thank you um yeah so I call Anna spec Anna infinite the book speculative non-fiction because like all these western art history books are actually already fiction in terms of like they can't even get this person's ethnicity with right [laughter] you know so it's like so we're creating fictions anyway you know um um and treating them as facts so so why not and that kind of ambiguity that you were talking about of like this could be true, this could not be true. Like disability as possibility in the past is like is something that I think is a thread between our two projects. >> Yeah, totally. And we um our our relationship to time is very um similar to you talking about there's no tense, you know, for um for us like um time is there's a mai um saying that we walk backwards into the future like um past, present, and future is all happening at the same time. and there's all these kind of connections as well. So, yeah, I don't think I'm being very eloquent this morning, but yeah, thank you for your question and yeah, it's been really awesome and um really great to hear about the um your work with the um this Gogan image cuz yeah, I grew up with Gogan being a really big a large figure because um there's a a famous one artist who does a lot of work around Gan and then lots of Tahesian people say that those figures are Tahesian. So, it's just um yeah, I think it's um important and interesting to hear about. Yeah. >> Thank you both so much. I wish that we could have more time. All right. Thank you. [applause]