The Rupture Sometimes

The image shows a close-up of a round white button with a hand-drawn disability wheelchair icon. The figure in the chair is holding what looks like a torch. In the center of the wheels below are the words "Gimps Drool," but the D is crossed out so it reads "Gimps rool."

DISABILITY, VANWARD

In the summer of 2012, I won Penn’s GAPSA-Provost Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation. I used the funds to travel to a disability studies residency called “Art Inclusion: Disability, Design, Curation” hosted by a team of faculty members in the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Irvine. There, I made a film from interviews with many of the residency participants. I call it an essay film because it works suggestively in four parts to expand how we understand the term “disability”; it shuffled between my voice and the experiences/thoughts of my interviewees to uncover the important stakes in opening up disability into a capacious brainspace.

You can see the resulting film on YouTube: “The Rupture Sometimes.”