For the project Crip Queer Aid, artist Ana Linhares uses their residency period at Hotel Maria Kapel as an exploring ground for research on crip and queer temporalities, the invisibility of illness and their erased narratives. They will take place for experimental research, narratives, building structures and supports, and/or will suggest possibilities that make the use of a studio and production space more accessible to an artist that moves within this sense of temporality. The insights will be shared during a public lecture performance that will take place on 25 June at HMK.

As a starting point, Ana will hang a picture of a bruise that appeared on her body on the same spot twice, without being aware of the cause. Ana documented this bruise shaped like a comet before it disappeared to never return again and will hang it in the chapel as a departure point for her residency period. The visible aspect of this bruise opposes the chronic pain Ana carries in her body that generally remains invisible.

While reflecting on their lived experience around disability (chronic pain and autism spectrum disorder) and the fatigue that comes with it, Ana finds it difficult to fill a gap in language. Experiencing pain, fatigue, and overstimulation can only be described and translated; as a temporality that others can never truly understand. Their artistic practice is based on forms of queering the archive and changing the approach to archives and storytelling and recently focused more on crip and queer time and its anti-capitalist nature. Due to their incapacity, Ana is constantly reminded of the idea that one needs to be productive and thus reach a state of optimal health because one’s temporality generally is actually to work and not take time to heal.

Ana Linhares experience around disability allows questioning one’s attitude towards it and the stories from it, which changes with time. In the last two years, Ana started to understand and accommodate their varying needs, instead of just insisting, forcing or working more to the point of burnout. Ana lives and works in Utrecht and holds a BA in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts - University of Porto (2012) and a MA in Fine Arts & Design, focused on artistic research from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (2019). Recently, their research extended to archival practices on queer and crip relationships within a community or institution with the ongoing project Crip Queer Aid.

Images: Ana Linhares, Crip Queer Aid, Casco Art Institute, 2020. Artist impression of Comet (2016) installed at HMK, as part of their residency in 2022.