In this residency carried out in partnership with \u00c9rudit, Map explores the search for a history of crip art in Qu\u00e9bec, 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.<\/strong><\/pre>\n\n\n\n

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 Qu\u00e9bec. The term \u201ccrip\u201d originates in the negatively connoted word \u201ccripple,\u201d which used to refer to a disabled person. It became an insult. Then, some disabled, mad,1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Like \u201cqueer,\u201d for the 2SIALGBTQ+, and \u201ccrip,\u201d for the disabled, the term \u201cmad\u201d is used with the aim of reappropriating a negatively connoted word, changing its meaning, and re-politicizing the category of \u201cmentally ill person.\u201d<\/span> neurodivergent, sick, and Deaf communities reappropriated \u201ccrip\u201d in a positive way to challenge the use of normalizing, \u201cpolitically correct\u201d terms. Crip is thus an umbrella term for the varied communities of disabled people and for their intersectionalities, including queer ones.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability<\/em> (New York: New York University Press, 2006).<\/span> <\/pre>\n\n\n\n
I began this investigation with filmmaker, curator, and professor Ariella A\u00efsha Azoulay, as I wished to unlearn the archives and to establish a practice based on \u201cfinding precedents … at least assuming that precedents could be found.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ariella A\u00efsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism<\/em> (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 17.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Azoulay tells us to find such potential pre-colonized worlds, to bring them forth, and to inhabit them here and now, I ask myself the following questions. How can this apply in the context of research into the potential history of crip art in Qu\u00e9bec? How do I situate myself, find my crip family history, without using the dominant archival methodologies? What is the crip community outside the purview of an imperialist categorization? What did the disabled, the mad, the sick, the neurodivergent, and the Deaf do in generations before, during, and after the forced institutionalizations in Qu\u00e9bec? Art? Nothing? Where were they? In hospice, at home, dead, in residential schools, or in other marginalized, queer, or art communities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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To the question \u201cWhere were we, the Deaf and disabled artists?\u201d I can answer only that, in Qu\u00e9bec, we were not in the conversations surrounding the various social movements (Quiet Revolution, struggle for human rights) or the artistic ones (Le Refus global<\/em>, the emergence of artist-run centres). Indeed, at the time (and still today, in fact), the disabled and the Deaf endured forced institutionalization in Canada, which included being forced to enter institutes for the Deaf (1850\u20131980), residential schools for the infirm (1900\u201360), the Duplessis orphanages (1944\u201360), and, more recently, long-term-care facilities. Even after their deinstitutionalization, which began in the 1960s, most disabled individuals were left stranded and without means and wound up in other types of institutions, such as prisons, shelters, and psychiatric hospitals. Like other marginalized people, we were out of the loop when artists began creating possibilities for self-determination. Of course, art-therapy workshops and arts-and-crafts training were offered. However, as pointed out by Suzanne Commend, researcher at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa and specialist in the history of physical disability in Qu\u00e9bec, the purpose of such activity was to produce useful citizens rather than artists.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Susanne Commend, \u201c\u2018Au secours des petits infirmes\u2019: les enfants handicap\u00e9s physiques au Qu\u00e9bec entre charit\u00e9 et exclusion, 1920-1990,\u201d PhD dissertation, Arts and Science Department, Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, 2018, 184.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, too little importance was given to the work of these craftspeople, compared to that of the signatories of Le Refus global<\/em>, born in the same period, and so there is no documentation on either their art production or their identity. Faced with this, I had to consult Azoulay. I imagined her telling me, \u201cInstead of bemoaning the inaccessibility of this lost knowledge, engage in a project that attains this knowledge differently, with other affected people.\u201d So I turned to the history of the AIDS crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an article published in Esse<\/em> magazine in 2017, \u201cPosterVirus: Views from the Street,\u201d Adam Barbu discusses the PosterVirus project and its posters on the topic of HIV\/AIDS, which were mounted in public spaces throughout Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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He reminds us that \u201cour society is anything but post-AIDS.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Adam Barbu, \u201cPosterVirus: Views from the Street,\u201d Esse<\/em>, no. 91 (Fall 2017): 32<\/span> As he points out, we have collectively convinced ourselves that AIDS is a thing of the past, partly because of a few medical advances since the 1990s, research that we only rarely question. Barbu goes further still by observing the tendency, in periods of crisis, to want to return to normality\u2014that is, to the situation before the sickness\u2014and to believe in it. It inevitably recalls the COVID-19 pandemic, which arose shortly after the publication of his article and during which the same phenomenon occurred. The \u201cfantasy\u201d of returning to the time before COVID, of erasing all the harm done, which persists, particularly among those living with long COVID\u2014and with grief\u2014isn\u2019t very different from what Barbu lays out regarding HIV-positive individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alex No\u00ebl, in his article titled \u201cLes bo\u00eetes noires,\u201d published in the magazine Libert\u00e9<\/em>,6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Alex No\u00ebl, \u201cLes bo\u00eetes noires,\u201d Libert\u00e9<\/em>, no. 341 (Winter 2024), accessible online.<\/span> is specifically concerned with the silence surrounding AIDS in Montreal, including with respect to the artists who succumbed to the disease before receiving any recognition from the cultural milieu. No\u00ebl sadly observes the blotting out of that pandemic, as much by governments as by universities, from both the historical and artistic perspectives. Like Deaf and disabled artists, artists living with HIV have very few elements to lean on in view of a potential crip history\u2014a necessity for initiating an eventual reconciliation with art history, but especially to gain self-recognition and attain the privilege (which shouldn\u2019t be one) of finally cherishing and celebrating oneself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his presentation of the \u201cAIDS Generations\u201d theme for Spirale<\/em> magazine,7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Daoud Najm, \u201cPr\u00e9sentation: g\u00e9n\u00e9rations sida,\u201d Spirale<\/em>, no. 248 (Spring 2014), accessible online.<\/span> Daoud Najm delineates AIDS not simply as a crisis of the past but as a subject no longer \u201cin vogue,\u201d including in the art scene. Yet it was at the heart of the cultural scene that activism against the disease took shape, a movement that changed a broad range of practices: in design (particularly with the creation by Gran Fury8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - An artist collective born of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an activist organization fighting against the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s.<\/span> and General Idea of posters and garments that fused art with activism and education, and the design of a logo representing a particular struggle, the pink triangle, which became a topic of study in marketing for its singularity and effectiveness); in film (creating its own cinematic trend to offset the prevailing (non-)representations in the media); in literature (with the emergence of a return to the body as a literary subject); and in visual and media arts (the practice of self-representation as testimony or documentary on the disease, medical environment, and grief). In this issue, Najm strives to counteract the current lack of interest, for not only is the generation having undergone the crisis still alive, with new infections continuing to occur (in 2023, the World Health Organization counted over 1.3 million seroconversions),9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - \u201cHIV and AIDS,\u201d World Health Organization, updated July 22, 2024, accessible online.<\/span> but, as Barbu reminds us, \u201cwe are still without a cure, and moreover … our society continues to partake in forms of violence against those living with HIV.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Barbu, \u201cPosterVirus,\u201d 32.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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