TETHERED + WEATHERED

Dis is a disability-led research collective using storytelling to advocate for the value of disabled experience within space and culture, working against the increasing isolation and atomisation of disabled people in art and architecture. As a new collective, Dis plans a network of disabled voices that brings form to our experiences. We see the disabled experience as not always a medical fact, but a living reality that comes with its own way of being and acting in the world. We see the disabled experience as a shared one, and the aim of Dis is to embed this experience, to teach it to others, and ultimately use its structures to critique, deconstruct, and reconfigure art and architecture.

James Zatka-Haas is a writer and artist who has been working within the realms of disability art and culture for the last five years. He has written for disabilityarts.online and has covered the Shape Open, Unlimited Festival, and Tate Exchange. He is interested in the ways meaning is expressed through art and writing, and blends different disciplines together to create an integrated body of thought. Having been born with Cerebral Palsy, James’ work probes what it is to experience the world from an altered perspective, understanding how that perspective shapes the way we see, feel, and love.

Jordan Whitewood-Neal is an architectural researcher, designer, and artist whose work addresses disability, domesticity, pedagogy, and cultural infrastructure. He is currently co-leading a Design Think Tank at the London School of Architecture on retrofitting as a process of civic reparation. Jordan is also an Architecture Foundation Young Trustee, and co-founder of disability-centered research collective Dis.

- MOSH PITS

There are moments in the places we share where you become suddenly exposed. The full brevity of your difference falls into view and history floods through you - of the times you were pushed or fell as a kid because of certain inescapable facts. Here you are caught wrestling with the potential future - of falling, tripping up, or being hit - as to placate the insecure present. Mosh Pits are preceded by countdowns: they are slow until they are suddenly not. They do not only belong to festival crowds and pub basement blizzards, but also exist in streets, squares, and stadiums - urgency and conviviality combine to aerate the atmosphere with movement. Bodies pulsate around an ever moving centre, and those whose rhythm differs or dapples become offset and fall off kilter. The mosh in the pit of the public, as if crowds had overflowed through the gates and security had retreated. This unique cultural act now surges. What is shopping if not a mosh pit, a capitalised response to necessity or love. But hear the music break. Crowds freeze in an instant. Bags are dropped and bodies reorganised as time slows and a well forms. The high street dissolves and the ground follows.

The mosh has returned home, but it is still no home to me. I go as fast as I can to escape the centre but its borders continue to grow. But what if I don’t need to fear it? The bodies take one last look before rushing, and this is either my last moment, or my greatest.

Mosh Pits splayed out over social media; droves of people, bodies moving in and then out, marching without music. Their presence here is political, floods of voices hammering out messages of loss and hope. Their protest is a mosh pit bigger than any other.

- PROTESTS

With the fracturing earth, our capacity for meaningful protest is rapidly slipping away. Our ability to move to a location, usually far away and built up, and sit there for 4, 5, or 6 hours to scream our anger doesn’t come easily. Some of us only use motors; some must plan weeks in advance; some of us have to weigh up the cost of infection. What is the cost of not showing up? Do our voices become muted or are we seen as not really engaging? What if showing up means having to use tools which go against climate action?

Cyberspace is an alternative, using technologybig tech technology - to step forward and mark out our positions. Yet for the sake of drowning in data, a thousand online voices rarely matches a hundred physical ones. To be presently there cements a moment. Our online voices come in droves, and they may be small an atomised, but it’s what we use and we’ve learnt to use it well. This rings true for disabled people as much as for anyone. That our lives and our wellbeing is dictated, perhaps more than most, by the whims of politics and culture, means we are obligated to show up in full when things do not work for us.

We are tethered to structures bigger than us. The question is not whether we should show up but whether we are able to.

To be disabled is to be tethered to procedure and habit. That procedure and habit allows us to roam the earth, It gives us a little taste of agency and a little autonomy over our patch. To move freely is a privilege, we know that, but we move enough so that we may engage. How far we move is really down to our own ability, what we have access to and what has been denied us.

Tethered protestors occupy the roads of London, tied together by motive, and means, as the storm brews and grounds shake with angry footsteps, they remain. They all come via different meanssome live close, others take the train, some walk - and yet the fact that they could easily make it is never brought to question. Protest is, they say, for us all. It is written into the folds of our communities, that we will be present when we are required to be.

- CLIMATE

Perhaps disabled people are ripe for climate action because we live close to the earth. For many of us, our lives are dictated by the environment, we have a fine-tuned relationship with it; of how it ebbs and flows; the overcrowded and over polluted streets, the lung blistering air and the burnt out summers. Our lives are impacted by these things greater than we might have thought, yet we have learnt to weather it. What impact the degrading climate will have on disabled people is very much dependent on who you ask. For some, the stagnating supply chains will block access to vital medicine, for others, the gradual move to electric cars will render the stock of cars granted on mobility allowances obsolete. Greater floods will leave us drowning.

There can be no universal disabled response to the climate emergency because there is no universal disabled experience.

Yet what of the near future? As our earth gradually divides between those most affected and those least, the supply chains we rely on for technology and medicine will become increasingly fraught, we will be left behind, forgotten, sacrificed, and omitted.

Climate change demands both movement and movements, displacement, and action. But what does it mean to be tethered? To be tied like an animal, to pull and yank as the rope tears itself and you. Events of man and worldly monsters circulate around you, the eye of the storm hovering overhead as you try and try and try to pull away.

Jordan Whitewood-Neal & James Zatka-Haas co-founders of Dis