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BIG READ Morongo Basin Opening Lecture and Performance
March 2 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
MARCH 2 5PM to 8PM (FREE RSVP appreciated)
5-6pm Keynote
6:30-8pm Performance
Copper Mountain College, Bell Center Community Room
6162 Rotary Way, Joshua Tree
Food Vendors Outside
How to be an Anti-Ableist: Reflections on Anti-Ableism, Disability, Accessibility, and Disability Justice
Using the concepts explored in the Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, Zankowicz will discuss models of disability, her own work re-framing accessibility as anti-ableism, and her journey to unlearn her internalized ableism and advocate for anti-ableist education and disability justice in museums.
45 mins, with a Q and A to follow
Kate Zankowicz (she/her/hers) is a museum education scholar and practitioner who has created community-driven, inclusive programming in museums in Canada and the U.S. for the past 20 years. Her practice has centered around creating collaborative programming with—not for—communities. As a museum educator with a disability, Zankowicz’s museum education pedagogy, scholarship and philosophy are grounded in her lived experience. She holds a PhD in Education, with a focus on museum-based education from the University of Toronto (OISE) and currently serves as the Program Manager for ReDiscover Center in mid-city Los Angeles, a sustainable youth makerspace. Her most recent publication is “The Call for Disability Justice in Museum Education: Reframing Accessibility as Anti-Ableism” in the Journal of Museum Education (Ware, Zankowicz and Sims)
5PM-6PM
Image Description: close-up headshot of a white woman with an oval face and medium length brown hair, who flashes a big smile.
Spontaneous Combustion’s Guinea Pig Fiesta
6:30PM-7:30PM
A multimedia piece from the minds of Erica Mosco and Jeff Pippin. Erica and Jeff have turned their experiences with mental challenges into a wild multimedia performance incorporating music, film and moving images. Inspired by both disability and joy, Erica and Jeff have channeled their everyday lives into themes exploring Guinea Pigs, Eyeballs, the human-robot pop star Renuvia. This is truly a crazy ride for the audience from Amazing Grace to the Vegetarian Wolf to the world cracked into pieces; bits of Ostrich Eggs float in the air.
Linda Carmella Sibio’s practice focuses on society and exploring how it affects culture as a whole. Madress has been a dominant theme in her work, having been influenced by her own diagnosis as schizophrenic and her mother’s incarceration in mental hospitals for 15 years during her childhood. Her philosophy reflects a combination of personal experience and intellectual pursuits and has been influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bacholors, Even,” Foucault’s “Madress and Civilization,” Antonin Artaud’s “Theater and It’s Double,” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus.”
Sibio’s work brings awareness to modern day ostracizing of the insane from a productive society. In ancient times the insane were looked to for insights and guidance, today they clean dishes and bus tables. We can learn a lot about our society and culture by how the mad are treated. As we dispose of human beings so then we go toward a disposable culture.
The fragmented thinking of the schizophrenic is actually a window into the placement of our culture. We are living in a deconstructed world no longer thinking linear thoughts. Our perceptions are continually interrupted by television, Internet, video surveillance, the media – we no longer have a single thought. We think in a multi-layered complex pattern. In order for our culture to go forward, the darkness of the dismembered body needs to come into the light. We need to fragment in order to become whole again.
Co-presented with Copper Mountain College
RSVP via link below