In June and September of 2022, B.O.O.K took part in a two-week residency at Talking Birds focusing on access riders.

B.O.O.K (Building Our Own Knowledge) is a working group of Black artists, curators, and researchers based in the West Midlands which re-distributes resources via artist residencies, commissions, and projects – with an emphasis on building sustainable ways of working/living and nurturing the development of ‘slow art’ practices.

During the residency, MJ Ajayi-Egunjobi, Jae Tallawah, Samiir Saunders, Sym Mendez, Hannah Adereti, and melissandre varin took part in a mixture of in-person and online internally facilitated workshops with the goal of collectively revisiting their own access riders as artists and artworkers, as well as re-imagining the standard practices of the artist / art institution relationship.

The process began by looking at the purpose of access riders as tools to communicate the needs of individuals who face harms within society that are often unaddressed in professional relationships. Throughout the week, the focus shifted towards an additional focus on what B.O.O.K working group member melissandre varin coined the “conditions of creation”.

This framing allowed the members to think about not only their experiences of harm, but also their experiences of joy and freedom. To examine the kindling which sparks the fire of creativity. To evaluate the times where creativity has flowed most intensely, freely, and beautifully.

The members talked about the importance of slowness in the transformational journey, the fact that meeting a communicative understanding with other beings requires time and honesty. It requires a dedication to curiosity and exploration, having the will to be open and ask uncomfortable questions and negotiate things which we may have been conditioned to believe are impossible. Even if we are rejected in the short term, the work of continually asking ties us into a legacy of transformative justice. The work of asking is also internal and requires an honesty with ourselves of or own needs, limitations, and abilities.

Below is a recorded excerpt from a conversation that some of the members had at the end of the residency, regarding the needs and desires that they each identified within themselves as a part of the residency process.

During the recording Hannah Adereti reads an excerpt from Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha:

“What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful? What does it mean for our movements? Our communities/fam? Ourselves and our own lived experience of disability and chronic illness? …How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?”

At the end of the recoding, melissandre closes with this quote from Art On My Mind, Visual Politics, Women Artists: The Creative by bell hooks.

“(…)we must create the space for feminist intervention without surrendering our primary concern, which is a devotion to making art, a devotion intense and rewarding enough that is the path leading to our freedom and fulfilment.”