Cinema Circle

"Crip-Benefit Analysis"

Curated and hosted by Derica Shields

Theory Stairs, 4:00-4:45 PM

What could it mean to make moving image works in which disability is the very centre? Against the Dutch injunction “doe normaal” and other cultural mandates that make enacting a constructed normalcy—ablebodiedness, sanity and wellness—a source of pride, this screening series presents works that confront and blow holes in barriers to disabled life and public existence.

In the mainstream, Access often amounts to ad-hoc accommodations, an approach justified with cost-benefit analysis (for example: why pay for a sign language interpreter if no d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing audience members will be present?). Not content to be tolerated in structures designed to exclude, many of the works in this series make accessibility a central element of their composition.

As they bend, warp, extend and lambast the limits of existing forms, these moving image works also decenter the stylistic norms that circulate in film and arts education, abandoning “show don’t tell” for plenty of voiceover and displacing “economy of style” for cascading repetition that carries us all along whatever our pace. Audio description that includes some elements and excludes others decenters the visual and critiques the fallacy of objectivity; captions overlap and crowd out easy legibility; and self-described Mad artists expose how concepts like rationality shroud violence that presents as care. These films don’t demand inclusion, they insist on structures and forms that can’t be assimilated into our current order. 

Across eight weeks, the screenings and discussions that make up "Crip-Benefit Analysis" will aim towards capacious encounters with access and offer space to relearn our fundamental entanglement with and dependence on each other.

Derica Shields is a writer and editor from South London and based in Amsterdam/Rotterdam, working across disciplines, with a particular focus on Black aesthetics, cultures and epistemologies. Her oral history project "A Heavy Nonpresence" which gathers seven Londoners’ accounts of the British welfare state was published by Triple Canopy in 2021. She was a 2022–23 resident at Jan Van Eyck Academie where she developed 'Given to Cottons and No Silk', a two-channel video installation and, in 2023, she gave the second annual Sylvia Wynter Lecture at King’s College London. Her book "Bad Practice" considers the potentials of Black failure and is forthcoming from Book Works.