All Roads Lead to AIDS: Keeping the Shutters Open

In this residency carried out in partnership with Érudit, Map explores the search for a history of crip art in Québec, questioning dominant archival methodologies and the erasure of Disabled and Deaf artists. The text highlights the links between queer struggles, HIV/AIDS and disability, arguing for an intersectional approach.

For this residency, I wanted to experiment with a research methodology that would allow me to meet possible companions. My hypothesis was that they might guide me to an accessible opening in the history of crip art in Québec. The term “crip” originates in the negatively connoted word “cripple,” which used to refer to a disabled person. It became an insult. Then, some disabled, mad,1 1  - Like “queer,” for the 2SIALGBTQ+, and “crip,” for the disabled, the term “mad” is used with the aim of reappropriating a negatively connoted word, changing its meaning, and re-politicizing the category of “mentally ill person.” neurodivergent, sick, and Deaf communities reappropriated “crip” in a positive way to challenge the use of normalizing, “politically correct” terms. Crip is thus an umbrella term for the varied communities of disabled people and for their intersectionalities, including queer ones.2 2  - Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 

I began this investigation with filmmaker, curator, and professor Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, as I wished to unlearn the archives and to establish a practice based on “finding precedents … at least assuming that precedents could be found.”³ 3 - Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 17.