Access is love
'Access is love' is quoted from and honours the Disability Justice Movement and the ongoing work of, among others, Mia Mingus, Sandy Ho, and Leah Lakshmi Pipezna-Samarasinha whose writing has been a constant inspiration for us.
Access is love.
Access is an ongoing conversation.
ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS is a Queer and neuroQueer performance collective and it is our aim to make our work in ways that recognise, centre, learn from and celebrate disabled and neurodiverse makers, ideas, ancestors, and audiences. In short, we proudly take a Crip-Queer approach to our work and our working relationships.
We work from the conviction that access needs to be an ongoing loving conversation rather than a policy, manifesto, or best practice formulation. This means we do not have a one-size-fits all access rider or our access policy printed up in a dusty ringbinder on a high shelf. It also means we begin thinking and talking about access every time we start a new project or meet a new collaborator. It is our aim to build this loving conversation into the DNA of the work right from the start — for ourselves, for our collaborators, for our potential audiences, and to keep this conversation going throughout the making process, the public presentations, and then beyond.
By engaging in this conversation over the long term, we aim to bring what we learnt in former projects to new works, to reflect on what well and what went wrong, and to assess where we are and where we want to be. Some needs stay the same. Many evolve and change. And each time we welcome someone new into our artistic family or form a new constellation with our existing collaborators, we recognise that we can’t take anything for granted.
We have developed our approach to access with the support of research projects. The conversations, reading and writing from these projects, along with some tools we are using, live on our website at:
— Autistic Long-Form as an Artistic Methodology (2023/24)
— Crip-Queer Rurality as an Artistic Methodology (2024)
We also have an open-source (and potentially collaborative) document of Loose & Messy Tips & Tricks, which outlines some of the things we do to help us to work as a collective.
If you want to have a conversation about access with us, please reach out. You can write to us at info[at]oncewewereislands.com. We are always happy to hear from you.
If you experienced a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS work and have feedback about your own access to the work, please also get in touch with us. Your opinion is valuable to us.
Access is an ongoing conversation.
ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS is a Queer and neuroQueer performance collective and it is our aim to make our work in ways that recognise, centre, learn from and celebrate disabled and neurodiverse makers, ideas, ancestors, and audiences. In short, we proudly take a Crip-Queer approach to our work and our working relationships.
We work from the conviction that access needs to be an ongoing loving conversation rather than a policy, manifesto, or best practice formulation. This means we do not have a one-size-fits all access rider or our access policy printed up in a dusty ringbinder on a high shelf. It also means we begin thinking and talking about access every time we start a new project or meet a new collaborator. It is our aim to build this loving conversation into the DNA of the work right from the start — for ourselves, for our collaborators, for our potential audiences, and to keep this conversation going throughout the making process, the public presentations, and then beyond.
By engaging in this conversation over the long term, we aim to bring what we learnt in former projects to new works, to reflect on what well and what went wrong, and to assess where we are and where we want to be. Some needs stay the same. Many evolve and change. And each time we welcome someone new into our artistic family or form a new constellation with our existing collaborators, we recognise that we can’t take anything for granted.
We have developed our approach to access with the support of research projects. The conversations, reading and writing from these projects, along with some tools we are using, live on our website at:
— Autistic Long-Form as an Artistic Methodology (2023/24)
— Crip-Queer Rurality as an Artistic Methodology (2024)
We also have an open-source (and potentially collaborative) document of Loose & Messy Tips & Tricks, which outlines some of the things we do to help us to work as a collective.
If you want to have a conversation about access with us, please reach out. You can write to us at info[at]oncewewereislands.com. We are always happy to hear from you.
If you experienced a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS work and have feedback about your own access to the work, please also get in touch with us. Your opinion is valuable to us.
Photo taken whilst walking together in the lanscape close to Saari Residence as part of the research residency ‘Crip-Queer Rurality’ as an Artistic Methodology, Nov-Dec 2024.