(Con cuidado): Helena Vinent

I like to imagine how danger brews, with our prosthetics as weapons, our homes as operation centers, and our allies as accomplices in an action against ableism –and our laughter in the background.

(Con cuidado) is a research and artistic project based on the identity of the artist Helena Vinent as a deaf and disabled. Through this proposal, Vinent wants to subvert the ableist¹ and paternalistic vision that categorized the disabled subject as retrieved, complacent, isolated, endearing, inhibited, submissive, inoffensive, and without political and sex-affective agency.

The exhibition is conceived as an imaginary world centered around the idea of a disabled band, understanding the concept of a band as a group of people coordinated on the basis of a common struggle, capable of disrupting the established order and regenerating scenarios. It is a call to action and to the self-recognition of the disabled, which immerses us in a dream-like conjuration and invites us to an encounter. In this encounter, desire, restlessness, provocation, rage, intuition, tenderness, play, fantasy and fear coexist between the real and the fictitious. An encounter in which one travels with care. With care because the disabled can feel the danger in a tangible way on them. With care because there is a need for collective self-care. And, above all, because disabled people feel that their time has come. With care because they are now part of a group that has started a countdown to take action.

Through subtitles, sculptural elements, sound, voice, and images, the artist presents speculative and essayistic fiction. Each element contains different interpretations that allow us to break with the idea of an absolute truth. Error, misunderstandings, and confusion are shown and are related to the artist's experience as a deaf person in the audio-centered ableist reality. The limits of perception are tested, making it difficult to assimilate everything that happens and also tensing what happens inside and outside the exhibition space.

From the anti-ableism movements –which have one of their best-known theoretical exponents in crip² theory– there is a strong critique of the productivist temporalities imposed under the conditions of late capitalism. Based on this idea, several pieces in the exhibition integrate a countdown and function as a possible reaction to the violent and stigmatizing situations faced by the disabled. The countdown timers speak of the different ways of understanding temporality from an anti-ableist perspective: the temporalities imposed by the system and irreconcilable with the need for slower rhythms, the urgency to change everything, and the warning of what could happen in the immediate future, when the timer reaches 00:00:00. In this case, it doesn't matter if this will happen, as the mere act of imagining it fulfills the promise that every performative act entails.

In short, Helena Vinent understands this fabulation as an identity and countercultural claim that destabilizes the idea of disability, normality and access. This call to action works, in turn, as the first symbolic action of the band, with the aim of generating some discomfort and subverting the homogenizing imaginaries established around disabled bodies, which have been transmitted through language, images, and other systems of representation. As writer and filmmaker Celestine Fraser states, "We need to see more disabled people behaving badly. […] More disabled people who are angry, bitter and abjectly un-inspirational – because frankly, there are a lot of us. So where have we all been hiding?³"

1. Ableism is the social, cultural, political, and economic system that discriminates against people who are categorized as disabled, excluding them from social spheres. It is a system –and a network of beliefs and practices– where bodies are valued according to standards of ability and bodily integrity, which belittles functionalities that do not conform to the dominant productive and biomedical model. In this sense, ableist logic discriminates based on abilities, assuming that certain body abilities are superior to others, based on a supposed essential human condition of normality.

2. Crip comes from cripple, and crip theory emerges as a critique within disability studies, providing a much more intersectional framework. This movement aims to approach both disability studies and queer movements from a transversal and critical perspective with the neoliberal condition and its ableism and the consequences of producing a certain normalized and normalizable body.

3. https://www.vice.com/en/article/akevzj/what-is-cripple-punk

Music and video sound: Carles Esteban.
Technical advisor for analog photographs: Carlos Vásquez Méndez.
Technical support for timers: Andrés Costa.
Acknowledgments from the artist: Tatiana Antoni Conesa, Nadal&Co, and the ADN team.