MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr) builds worlds along three arts-design research structures: Anti-Ableist Technologies, The Meltionary and Zeitgeber. Actioning shape-shifting processes that generate material, aesthetic and infrastructural transformations with Trans* feminisms and Disability Justice, their work interweaves themes of: climate change, coalition building, critical technical practice and access. MELT's work resources ways of being together that figure in the present and future our flourishing.
MELT engages a value based practice that centers Disability Justice, Trans*feminisms, anti-racist and critical technical practices. Emerging from this work we offer lectures, courses & workshops for a range of arts and academic contexts.
ACCESS SERVER is an email server that anonymizes, collects and financially compensates access requests that disabled people send towards cultural institutions. Access requests explain what a disabled person needs to attend spaces, be they online or physical. ACCESS SERVER works against exclusions by uplifting and upholding our beloved disability communities: together, we work to disrupt systemic ableism in cultural institutions.
In this workshop on ACCESS SERVER, we unfold our project in three sections: first, through an introduction to the ableist conditions that this project refuses by upholding disabled brilliance and our needs, secondly through an introduction to the project itself and its mechanisms and thirdly through practicing access practices together by writing emails to cultural institutions in order to transform institutionalised ableism as we know it.
CCCB - Center for Contemporary Culture Barcelona
N.E.O.N. - Neon Digital Arts, Dundee
COUNTING FEELINGS is an artistic research project that questions how and with what intentions the experiences of marginalized groups are quantified, compiled and counted as data - and moves towards reclaiming data to recount different - or other - stories. In this two part workshops series, Collecting Data as a Counter-Practice & Building Datasets, we explore what counter operations for data collection there might be, and we move into empowerment with building our own community relevant data sets.
Crip the Curriculum at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam
Ritual for Abolition: Make a list of ways to address harm and conflict in your everyday life that do not relate to punishment or incarceration.
In this two day workshop we engage our ongoing practice of developing rituals that celebrate and make space for trans*, queer, non-normative and neuroqueer ways of being in the world. Together we learn about ableism and anti-queer entanglements and activate ritualistic practices that may reduce access barriers, change habits, slow things down, and/or enact community rites of passage. Through working with everyday materials that come from our surroundings we will make space for material companions that might support us in this work.
Queer Methodologies for Creative Technologies, Bristol
Alternative Education Program, Rupert, Vilnius
Pressure on the body can slow down heartbeats and create feelings of calmness – or, might, if the pressure become to much, bring up questions of how much it is that one can hold. In this session we will create pressure objects from plastic bags, sand and stones to experience weight as a Zeitgeber (time-giver) on our bodies. Plastic itself is a material of pressure and time, as crude oil is formed through both, only to be then transformed into a material that capitalism burns through all too quickly. In this pressure deep time plastic massage we will experiment with holding pressure literally.