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Makeshift Workshop: Access & Ethics Rider, a space to dream relationships of justice and build collective power

Leah Manaema Avene, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, TextaQueen and others

Presented in Season 2 2024

Presented by Arts House and TextaQueen

Thursday 10 October 2024 
11am – 4pm 

Applications are now closed.

This workshop is hybrid and will take place at Arts House and online. 

Arts House 
North Melbourne Town Hall 
521 Queensberry St, 
North Melbourne 

Warnings 
This workshop contains content including ableism, colonialism, racism, surviving violence. 

Access Notes 
If you are participating in person, masks will be provided and required to be worn. Please be fragrance-free when attending. This workshop space has windows that can be opened for ventilation, portable air purifiers, natural sunlight and dimmable lights. A range of supportive seating is available. 

Auslan interpreting and auto captioning on request – please include in your EOI. 
 
An Access Guide will be available prior to the workshop. 

Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne

Wheelchair Accessible
Quiet Space Available
Assistance Animal

Learn how to craft a rider that expresses your access accommodations and ethics.  

As part of the local and global response to the ongoing genocides happening in a world experiencing climate crisis, it is imperative that we as artists, question the sources of funding and support that nurture and advance our practices. How do we ethically create, aid and support each other as we work towards our interconnected liberation? How do we ask for and lean towards collaborations that foster accommodation and care? 

Prompted by process-driven creative activities, this workshop provides space for artists/ curators/ organisers to explore incorporating ethical considerations into an access rider as a tool to share with future collaborators and organisations for relationship building and accountability mapping. 

We will engage with relational maps regarding ethics and access in the career experiences of disabled artist collaborators and consider how our ethics and access needs contribute to our choices, opportunities and directions.  

Led by Leah Manaema Avene, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and TextaQueen this process intends to expand artist’s toolbox for examining and refusing collusion with oppressive powers, so that the cultural spaces we co-create can truly be divested from injustice. 

Who it is for 
This workshop is for disabled and/or BIPOC artists of all disciplines who are interested in learning more about crafting access riders for their work as artists/curators/organisers and collectively build richly accessible cultural space together. This workshop also broadens this focus to art making in ethical relationship to land, decolonisation, being in right relation with each other, and working in solidarity against oppression. 

How to apply 
Lead Makeshift artists determine the application and selection process for participating artists. 

We want you to apply in the format that is easiest for you.   

Responses to questions in the EOI can be submitted here as:  

  • Written  
  • Video  
  • Audio  
  • Auslan (we can arrange interpretation or captioning of your video if needed)  

For each question, there is space to write an answer or include URL link with your preferred format. 

This Makeshift Workshop can support up to 10 participants in person at Arts House and 10 participants online. All participants are provided with a $100 honorarium. Participants joining in person are provided lunch and $100 local travel support. 

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About the facilitators

Leah Manaema Avene (she/them) is a mother, musician, broadcaster, facilitator and educator of Irish and Tuvaluan ancestry whose work focuses on personal, relational, collective and systemic repair, healing and transformation. Leah established Co Culture + Communication in late 2016 in response to a growing frustration that organisations’ ‘Equity and Inclusion Policies’ were performative and not living breathing commitments to transformation. Through studying a Masters in Gestalt Therapy, teaching and implementing Culturally Safe and Responsive Practice, parenting, unschooling, educating, working in community and collaborating with young people, Co Cultural Practice has emerged through lived experience, research and the generous mentorship of many elders, most significantly Rachel N Edwardson and David S Vadiveloo.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a nonbinary femme disabled writer and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is DIsabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers.

TextaQueen is a multi-genre queer disabled artist of Goan descent living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Known for using the humble felt-tip marker to create majestic portraiture, their practice also includes painting, self-publishing, printmaking, video, performance, curating, writing and murals to envision an ever-expanding alternate universe of collective and transformative possibility. Their work has been shown at 198 Contemporary Arts, London; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery as a nationally touring mid-career survey in 2017, and at 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2022 as the inaugural Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission recipient for ‘Bollywouldn’t’. TextaQueen is currently developing TheySwarm, a peer-mentorship artist residency for diverse and disabled artists, in their Johnston Street, Collingwood studio.

Presented by Arts House and TextaQueen

Thursday 10 October 2024 
11am – 4pm 

Applications are now closed.

This workshop is hybrid and will take place at Arts House and online. 

Arts House 
North Melbourne Town Hall 
521 Queensberry St, 
North Melbourne 

Warnings 
This workshop contains content including ableism, colonialism, racism, surviving violence. 

Access Notes 
If you are participating in person, masks will be provided and required to be worn. Please be fragrance-free when attending. This workshop space has windows that can be opened for ventilation, portable air purifiers, natural sunlight and dimmable lights. A range of supportive seating is available. 

Auslan interpreting and auto captioning on request – please include in your EOI. 
 
An Access Guide will be available prior to the workshop. 

Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne

Wheelchair Accessible
Quiet Space Available
Assistance Animal

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, Arts House through City of Melbourne.

Image credit: TextaQueen, detail of “Roots”, Fibre tips and watercolour on cotton paper 127 × 97 cm

Image description: Marker drawing on paper of a medium-brown-skin arm and a leg, entwined with roots of a pale grey-brown tree trunk whose bark is like elephant skin. Small bright green leaves of a vine weave through the roots, peachy rocks, pale autumn leaves and dirt.