Biography
Critically acclaimed queer artists: Lorin Sookool (SBYA2023, Pina Bausch2021), Denise Onen (DAAD Arts and Media ’23, Oram Award Nominee ’22) and Louise Westerhout (UJ AIR 2024) investigate themes of collapse through the critical lens of Crip Theory and Mad Studies (Sweeney, A. 2016). Embedded within multimedia strands of movement, sound, text, and projection, this piece extends the meaning of hyperaccessibility to include physical, ethical, emotional, and practical considerations. The triptyque blends media and accessibility tools: projected creative captions, graphic scores, and Integrated Audio Description, creating a radical inclusion for crips, neurodivergent folk, and trauma survivors. They also suggest a perceptual meta-consciousness of and for the 3 artists, weaving together their lived realities and critical inquiries in this multidimensional offering.
Synopsis
For Live Art, this unperformance takes place at the site of collapse: mental, emotional, physical - through songs of survivorship, refrains “long live the abusers,” and the sounding of her tired black bodies’ compulsory resilience.
Onen practices an ontology of noise/music. She seeks to facilitate embodied listening, inviting listeners to perceive sound as both medium and messenger, and to reflect on their own experiences and dis/connections to the work and to themselves. With Lorin and Louise, she extends this invitation.
Together we ask, “How would a performance emerge if crip and queer artists had autonomy and full consent from witnesses (and/or themselves); to pause, to stop, to opt out, and to feel that enough effort has happened?” This foundation of the crip aesthetic insists that capacity is constantly changing and that the metrics of value are always evolving. This exploration of the micropolitics of care decolonises hierarchies between performer and audience, listener and storyteller, the creator and the created. We share reflexively from a place of vulnerability, aiming to create a space that is centred in care and awareness - a place that holds people, the way we hold each other’s vulnerability as friends.