What if My Body is a Beacon for the World?

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new ways to think about collaboration & techniques that support neurodiverse creation

Neurodiversity & Languaging:

Saturday 11 January 2025, 3 to 5 pm

Presented by Dis Assembly & Koffler Arts Youngplace (180 Shaw Street)

This panel is convened to discuss the work of Adam Wolfond and Dis Assembly, presented in the exhibition What If My Body Is A Beacon For The World? at Koffler Arts (January 9 - 26, 2025). This is the first video/sound installation directed by a non-speaking autistic person. Poetry and artistic processes merge in this exhibition that explores autistic perception and movement as well as the techniques required to support and collaborate with autistic people beyond therapy.

Rather than gazing at the autistic in a typical narrative piece, Wolfond’s work asks us to reconsider autism as relational, where the vectors of human and more-than-human interrelationality come together in a fractalized perception of spacetime, and raises questions about neurotypicality and the dominant normative forms in which we have all been taught to move and think.

All panelists will provide a brief presentation on their work with Wolfond and other neurodiverse people, and how the processes with Dis Assembly participants are mutual collaborations rather than hierarchical assignments. This work makes us question our own assumptions about how we not only think about autism, but how a diverse human species offers alternative ways of knowing the world, leading to new grammars and forms.

Panelists include:

Dr. Erin Manning, Faculty of Fine Art at Concordia University and Director of 3 Ecologies Project, Montreal

Chris Martin, poet and author of May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism and Our Neurodiverse Future and Director of Unrestricted Editions, El Cerrito, California

Dr. Estée Klar, artist, critical disabilities/neurodiversity scholar and Director of Dis Assembly, Toronto

Adam Wolfond, man of autism, author, artist, and director of video/sound installation, What If My Body Is A Beacon For The World?, Toronto

The program will include discussion among the panelists and questions from the audience.

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