Raffia Li with Sandra Lange and Yunfan Tian
11 August, 14:00-16:00 [Zoom webinar, in English]
Please register here for the online webinar
After: Meet & Greet, 17:00-18:30 [at HMK, doors open from 13:00]

The ableist structure of a standardized time directed towards productivity often leaves too little time for the access making of public spaces to bodies that have different needs, rhythms and temporalities. How do we make/meet in another “time”?

To start this research-based residency, Raffia invites two collaborators, Sandra Lange and Yunfan Tian, for an opening dialogue on the notions of time, body, and space/access making, based on each other’s own lived experiences. Raffia will be in the space of HMK moving along/against its many stairs with a ladder, while Sandra and Yunfan each join from their home in Zwolle and Suzhou. They chose an online format for this meeting because it could potentially bring people in, regardless of the inaccessible architecture of HMK. However, they will also investigate the scores of moving together in this online space, facing how the accessibility tools like the zoom auto captioning function keeps failing. Or at least now we turn the mistakes into poetry? 

Whether online or offline, moving together means to constantly make new rhythms and navigate through the space together. How can we make shared spaces that welcome constant changes? What questions need to be asked before we feel ready for those possibilities?  

Access Information:
· Registration via https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_joMRcy15SF6sqsVJlMsqEw
· No camera or microphone required for attendees. 
· Languages: spoken and written English, Mandarin, Dutch Sign Language
· with Zoom Translated Captions
· Audio Description: Yunfan Tian
· Interpreters:
Marieke Xia, Lela Fontijn (Dutch Sign Language - English)
Luanjiao Hu (spoken English - Mandarin)
Wenyan Tang (spoken English-Chinese sign language)

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· Raffia Li (TA/They/She)’s practice has been focusing on working with “otherwise” languages as poetic and political space for relation making/transforming, challenging and interrupting normative way of knowledge and value production. They tilt in slow dialoguing. They work with poetry melting in minor edges/senses, in forms of performances, videos or installations. Their art practice is deeply influenced by poetry, theatre of the oppressed, reading of Zhuangzi, their field research over shadow puppetry and their rituals in China, Thailand, Indonesia and India, their learning experience of being in a sign language art collective Shape of Language & their actions in the hutongs and streets, running a community art festival, diary/letter exchanges with friends, their MA study at Dutch Art Institute, observations of their dreaming state, and the river near Grandma 芹’s yard.

· Sandra Lange is a performance designer, independent researcher, writer and soon-to-be podcast host situated in the Netherlands. Her understanding of the interlocking systems of privilege and power has come about through involvement with (non-) academic contexts of art, activism and scholarship. The design of spaces, exchanges, and trainings is rooted in intersectionality, theories of complex embodiment, body-mind practices and crip cultural literacy. Lange is interested in building connections that amplify the knowledge of disabled and chronically ill people, for example by offering friction as a tool to unpack ableism in institutional infrastructures. As a “crip-coach” Sandra Lange shares knowledge about self-care, energy management and disability advocacy with people who newly identify as disabled and/or sick. In her research project she investigates the fluidity of a bodies’ ability and mobility in relation to time and pace by practicing radical slowness.

· Yunfan Tian lives with progressive spinal muscular atrophy and moves with wheelchairs. She is an audio description maker and narrator, she writes poetry and makes art to explore feelings of freedom. Her audio description works range from script writing to online and offline recording, for dance art films, documentaries, pioneering experimental theatres, touch tours, dubbing for VR installations, museum tour training, body-based practices and improvisation theatres, which have been presented at 2021 UK-China Contemporary Culture festival, the 3rd UK-China Disability Arts Forum, Goethe-Institut Peking among others.