Episode 13: Contra* Stairs with Shannon Finnegan

Introduction:

Welcome to Contra*: the podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing.

I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie .  I am a professor at Vanderbilt University, a designer and design researcher, and the director of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institution collaborative focused on disability, technology, and critical theory.  Members of the lab collaborate on a number of projects focused on hacking ableism, speaking back to inaccessible public infrastructures, and redesigning the methods of participatory design—all using a disability culture framework. This podcast provides a window into the kinds of discussions we have within the lab, as well as the conversations we are interested in putting into motion. So in coming episodes, you’ll also hear from myself and the other designers and researchers in the lab, and we encourage you to get in touch with us via our website, www.mapping-access.com or on Twitter at @CriticalDesignL

How are disabled artists challenging the design of museums and public spaces? In this episode of Contra*, Critical Design Lab member Kevin Gotkin and I talk to Shannon Finnegan, whose work draws attention to the need for rest in spaces that often require extended sitting, standing, and movement.

Interview:

Aimi Hamraie: I'm so excited to welcome Shannon Finnegan to the podcast today. And I'm also here with Kevin Gotkin, who appeared in an earlier episode and is part of the critical design lab. So welcome, Shannon and Kevin.

Shannon Finnegan: Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Gotkin: Hey.

Aimi Hamraie: Sure. So the reason why we are talking to you, Shannon, and that Kevin is part of this conversation, is that you've both been doing projects related to stairs in New York City, and doing artistic and scholarly interventions into the mandatory stair use politics that is pervading the landscape right now, and these ideas about taking the stairs to be healthy and that kind of stuff. So we're really excited to talk to you about your projects that emphasize sitting and also protesting stairs. I think also that you're participating in and contributing to and building this moment around disability artistry that it seems like is happening in New York City right now. So I'm excited to talk more about that. Why don't we, to get started, talk about your Museum Benches and that project and how it evolved?

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. I think when it comes to access in general, I'm often thinking about the long-term and short-term goals that we have, and a lot of the work around access seems like a really long-term project. Especially thinking about the way that all of these systems of oppression are intertwined, and we're talking about really massive systemic change. And then on the other hand, I see things where I'm like, "This could happen tomorrow." You know? Like if we prioritize this, we could have this right now. And that was really where...

Shannon Finnegan: I go to museums in New York. I think this project was inspired by a visit to MoMA in particular, and just feeling like, "This is an exhausting experience for me. This is so hard on my body." And the seating is so sparse, and there's so many people gathered around every little bench. Just feeling like, "Why? Why is it like this?" Thinking about how...

Shannon Finnegan: So I started doing some research around benches. I think my original instinct was that museums actually don't want us to linger there, that that's the reason that there aren't benches. And of course, there's all sorts of problems in that, in terms of the way that that affects different people differently. But I was talking to lots of curators and people in education departments, and they were like, "No, no, no, that's definitely not it." And I was talking to people and I was like, "Oh, is it just the cost? Is it just that benches are expensive?" And that wasn't it. And then finally I figured out that it's mostly curators and the way that curators envision a space, and certain things around sightlines and vistas of an exhibition, and this framework that they have for what an exhibition "should" look like. So I think that was part of what sparked me to think about other ways of getting seating into an exhibition and thinking about seating as an artwork.

Shannon Finnegan: So I designed this series of benches that all have text on them. And so for example, one says, "This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree." Some are a little bit more open ended, like, "I'd rather be sitting. Sit if you agree." Some more represent a reference, like the embodied experience that I was having more, like, "I'd love to spend more time here, but all this standing is painful."

Shannon Finnegan:

I think it's also been part of... I don't think I realized this at the time, but part of it has been thinking about what disability brings to protest or how to create protest experiences that are doable, at least for me. Thinking about this as... We think about protest in all these super ableist terms around standing and marching. But there's, of course, such a rich history of sitting as protest and I think one of the things I'm interested in with the benches is that they offer a voice or a form of protest, while also offering an amenity and rest.

Aimi Hamraie: I'm so struck by how the ocular centrism of the design of a space would be what leads to the absence of benches, like the whole lines-of-sight thing. It presents a cross-disability issue too, because it presumes that people are not only seeing the space and using it in that way, but also then able to stand for long periods of time or walk for long periods of time.

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. I think I see the way that arts institutions are approaching exhibitions as an extremely narrow set of experiences, and both myself and, I think, lots of other disabled people have been trying to expand that and push back on that in different ways. Yeah, absolutely. I think the ocular centrism of exhibition spaces is a huge part of that. I think that's an area that I'm still learning a lot about. My training is very visually focused. My background is in drawing and print-making. That's something that I have been trying to figure out a lot more, recently, in terms of thinking about other disabled people as the primary audience for my work, and then what that means, how that influences what I'm making, and how I'm making it. Specifically, I think, for me, it's been important to think about how the ways that I have worked have centered vision and how I can shift that or change that.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that's really interesting, and I definitely want to come back later in our conversation to that idea of disabled people primarily being the audience for your work, because it seems like they're... Part of this moment is that there's so much experimentation around what the materiality of a space can be, and how you communicate information about it, so there's like depth space architecture and various things like that. So yeah, I'd be really interested and curious to see how things like that take shape.

Aimi Hamraie: Another thing I really love about the benches... Well, they're blue, and I think they're very striking, but I like the idea that they're interactive. So there's the text that says, "Sit if you agree." Indicates some sort of political project, but also a political practice that people can opt into. So I wonder if you could say a little bit about that.

Shannon Finnegan: I guess what part of it was that... I felt like people were already being pretty clear about their preferences in museum spaces because the benches are always so full. I felt like that was already being communicated to the museum on some level, that this is something we want, because look, we're using this all the time. I think I was interested in making that even more explicit. Like, "Yes, we're using this feature because this is important to us on an access level," and trying to figure out...

Shannon Finnegan: I think something I'm also thinking about in my work is, what are points of connection between disabled and non-disabled experiences? Seating in museums is such a broad-based... There's just a lot of people who are interested in that, lots of whom don't identify as disabled. It felt like something... And that was part of how I shaped the text, was to leave that open-ended. So it wasn't like someone had to identify as disabled or take on that label in order to show support for that idea.

Aimi Hamraie: I haven't actually been in a space with your benches yet, but it seems like there's this idea of people voting with their bodies or something like that. Leaving data, leaving evidence, and making that explicit as part of the critical project of this, versus other types of seating design that might be more aesthetic or functional or something like that.

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. One thing I've been thinking about is, as I evolve the project, is how to make it... Like it was really important to me that the bench had a back when I was doing it, because when I see a backless bench in a space, I'm like, "Oh, that's a perch. That's designed for me to be there briefly, but that's not really an invitation to stay there and relax." But the benches are made out of MDO, which is basically a type of plywood, and firm surfaces are good for some bodies. But I think some bodies would really like a cushion. So I've been thinking about how I can do something similar but with pillows or things that feel like there's even more sources of comfort there.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask about the bench design itself, because there's so many non-apparent specifications around seating, usually, that invite different ways of taking up space. Maybe you lean back, or maybe it encourages you to put your arms behind you or lay down or... So what were some of the considerations that went into the template for this bench?

Shannon Finnegan: Well, so this was a pretty new venture for me, in terms of designing seating. I think in my dream world, it would have been something where... If I had the expertise to really study ergonomics or think about having even curved shapes in it. I think there were some limitations just in terms of my ability to fabricate it and create it. But yeah, it was really important to me that there was a back, because of the way that that both, for me, is much more comfortable, and also I feel like there's a real signaling around that.

Shannon Finnegan: And then definitely not having any of those dividers or things like that, so that you have the option to lie down on it. The bench is about six feet, so it's pretty easy, you know, depending on your height you can stretch out on it a little bit. I think I would've maybe liked arm rests on the side or something like that. But that was beyond my capabilities.

Shannon Finnegan: And I was originally thinking that it was going to pack flat. That was a big dream for these, that ended up not really coming to fruition. But that was part of why it's a pretty planar design.

Aimi Hamraie: And so you're learning woodworking and furniture design and stuff as part of this. I think that they look very comfortable, and it's interesting because right now there's such a politics around, as you said, public benches having dividers, that sort of regulatory addition that prevents people from sleeping on benches and stuff. It seems like a simple thing, like having a bench that's long enough for a body and wide enough for a body to lay down on, is actually pretty revolutionary.

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. One of the things that I... I've made some that are for museum spaces, but I also drafted some text and did some sketches around ones that could exist in public space. Because that's another thing that I'm thinking about all the time, as I'm moving through New York City, is having opportunities to rest are so important to me, and it's so rare, and it's so marked by class and by access to a cafe or something like that. I'm just always struck by how little public seating there is, and that it gets also concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods, so that when you're on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there's lots of seating options suddenly available. But then in other areas, it's really, yeah, really sparse.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, totally. It seems like there's so much regulation that goes into deciding where bus benches go, versus little perches that someone can lean up against and shelters and stuff. I've done a little bit of work with some tactical urbanists here in Nashville, and we just go around and build benches and build... I think Kevin, actually, you volunteered at one of those events too, didn't you? A few years ago?

Kevin Gotkin: Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie: Creating public seating or even roundabouts and curb cuts and crosswalks and stuff like that.

Kevin Gotkin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah.

Kevin Gotkin: And so Shannon, we had your benches... So the benches were recently in an exhibition called Talk Back that was at a gallery called Flux Factory, and I helped throw the closing party for this show, and we put one of the benches right in front of the DJ booth, which was an honor for me. Like I have a Finnegan bench in front of my DJ's booth! It was amazing.

Kevin Gotkin: And one of the things that I just was thinking about as the party was going on is that the text gets covered up when people use it, right? Like that's part of what you said earlier, Aimi, about the interactivity and the participation that the pieces invite. And for some people it becomes one of those games where they're trying to figure out what it says, and then I was realizing that's really not the point, when this is a piece that sits on that beautiful interface of access and artistry, right? Or access and aesthetics, that the feeling of sitting down and experiencing rest, in an exhibition space that typically doesn't have that feature, is a totally different kind of knowledge than the typical privileged curatorial perspective of being able to stand back and look.

Kevin Gotkin: So for some people they were like, "Ooh, the bench says something. It must be a work. I don't want to sit there." And then as soon as people sat down and covered up the text, it just integrated itself into the whole access ecosystem of the party and of the exhibition on a daily basis. So that was something that I was thinking about too, that the role of the text in the bench forces this new experience of the body too, once the text gets covered up by people actually using it.

Shannon Finnegan: I love that.

Aimi Hamraie: So I'm wondering what's the relationship between the Museum Benches project and then your other project, which is the Anti-Stairs Lounge?

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. Both similar, in that they're both trying to think about how I can intervene as an artist into inaccessible spaces. The Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, there's been two versions of it, but the original version was created for the Wassaic Project, which is an exhibition space that's in a historic mill building. So it's this super vertical space. It's seven floors with no ramp or elevator above the ground floor. And they have this big group exhibition of emerging artists every summer. There's like 50 to 70 artists, and a lot of that work is not accessible at all.

Shannon Finnegan: So I was thinking about what my responsibility or role was as a disabled artist, in terms of engaging with that space, and felt like I really wanted to do something that directly addressed the inaccessibility of the space. So I created what's essentially an enclosed room on the ground floor of the exhibition space, and in the room there's seating, there's some light refreshments, there's chilled seltzer, there's a charging station, but that space is behind a locked door. In order to get access to the space, you have to sign in at the front desk, saying that you're not going upstairs. So the lounge becomes a space that's exclusively for people who are staying on the ground floor.

Shannon Finnegan: I think, for me, I was trying to think about how to do something that was additive to the space, that... Be part of something that creates a better experience for a disabled visitor to the space, while also being really clear about the limitations of the space and the inaccessibility.

Shannon Finnegan: That was the original version of it, and then more recently I did an iteration of the project for this thing that was built in New York called The Vessel, which is referred to as a public artwork, but it's really at the scale of a building. It's eight floors, 154 interconnected stairways. They sometimes say a one-mile vertical climb.

Shannon Finnegan: It's just so frustrating to have something like that be built. We so often hear, around accessibility, that it's not possible because there isn't a budget, or because it's a historic building. And so to see something with a $150 million budget, that's brand-new construction, that is just so ableist in its conception and the way it imagines the public, was just really frustrating for me.

Shannon Finnegan: I felt like I really wanted to do something in response to that. I organized an Anti-Stairs Club Lounge to protest that space. I was worried about whether we would be asked to leave, or interactions with security or police, so I designed it to... I worked really hard to make it so that it was really hard for them to point to anything we were doing as not allowed.

Shannon Finnegan: So the lounge basically consisted of people who were in the lounge, were wearing these neon orange beanies with this anti-stairs symbol on it. And then there were these newspapers that had Kevin's article about The Vessel printed inside, but the exterior part of it just said Anti-Stairs Club Lounge. So it kind of functioned as signage. There were cushions and snacks and yeah.

Shannon Finnegan: I felt like the best way to protest The Vessel was to just show how we as disabled people are interested in using public space, and what we want from public space, which I think is just the opportunity to be together and lounge and gather. And so the purpose of it was to do that. Oh, and then the other thing is that everyone who participated in the lounge had to sign a pledge that said, "As long as I live, I will not go up a single step of The Vessel."

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. Very good. Kevin, do you want to say anything about your article and and also this action? Because you were a part of it, right?

Kevin Gotkin: Yeah, it was such an honor to be a part of that action. So I had been asked to write a piece for an architecture review journal out of Columbia university called The Avery Review. It's a great publication because they're really sick of the way that architecture reviews happen. It's usually like, famous person lends their name to some review that's a glowing write-up of another famous person's thing. Reviews just tend to bolster. No one is getting into the stuff, right? It just is all this reputation economy or whatever.

Kevin Gotkin: So they started this journal and were like, "Let's do it differently. Let's really review stuff. Even if what you're reviewing is a blueprint or a pamphlet or whatever." So they asked me to think about The Vessel and I really was like, "Ooh, this is great. A lot of my research is about public culture of endurance." And once I started to just scrape the surface, it was so overwhelming, right?

Kevin Gotkin: The publicity, the rollout around this design, it's a... Thomas Heatherwick is kind of a golden boy of architecture, and the way that this was decided was very insular. There was really no public deliberation around this design, even though the whole Hudson Yards development was heavily funded by public funds. It's a quintessential neoliberal model for how a public space gets redeveloped primarily to support commercial interests. Most of the whole complex is retail, which is very interesting to me, because I'm like, "Really? Another mall?"

Kevin Gotkin: The Vessel actually stands out as like the public... It's the place where you don't have to pay to go. It's the space that is dedicated to the public. And in the rollout, in the way that they were thinking about this, Heatherwick started calling it the Social Climber, because it was a way for people to be social and climb. But of course, there's that gross aspirational and disgustingly capitalistic-like connotation.

Kevin Gotkin: They hired or they commissioned Alvin Ailey Dance Company to design choreography, actually, around what is so plainly the aesthetics of endurance. So there's this little film where Alvin Ailey dancers are coming out of their houses, their brownstones, and racing down the steps and starting to race everywhere. And the whole film is different kinds of stairs. And the idea is like, "New York, where everyone's just hustling, and you're working so hard," right? And then in the end, all of the dancers assemble coming out of the 7 Train, the Hudson Yards, which was a subway station that was crucial to the entire redevelopment, and they all assemble and start doing this dance, and their shadows as dancers form this honeycomb pattern that is The Vessel structure.

Kevin Gotkin: So it's almost like the bodies of the public come together to form this set of stairs, this interconnect [inaudible 00:25:54] of stairs. It's just so stunning, the various ways that the aesthetics of endurance and able-bodiedness, compulsory able-bodiedness, inform this thing, and how it's just such a fascinating natural experiment, too, in folks' awareness about ableism. Because so many people hate it or love it but don't have any understanding of the way that this piece is steeped in ableist design. And then as soon as you say it, for some people it's a major aha moment.

Kevin Gotkin: And for some people they're like, "Well, there is an elevator." There is an elevator, but the elevator, for most of the development of that piece, had totally no information about how it would work. At one point, they were like, "Only folks with physical disabilities can use that," which was an impressive optimism about how disability determination works. Like they were just going to have security guards being like, "You're disabled enough. You're..."

Kevin Gotkin: It was so baffling through the whole... Partly because I signed the pledge, I promised I would never go up there. I still don't really know how it works. They have, at the moment, a kind of ticketing system, so it's free, but you reserve space to go, and I have no idea what kind of stuff goes on at that interface when you use the elevator. That was not a part of the original design.

Kevin Gotkin: And in fact, city agencies were involved after the design was released, in thinking about how disability was excluded, really just to co-opt the consultation and be able to say, like, "We had a meeting about it." And disabled activists are being used to say, like, "Oh, well, they were in the room when we talked about it," but nothing changed after those meetings. It's an example of the real failure of consultation, or the performance of consultation, where nothing meaningful happened. And it also, of course, shows you ableist commitments from the start determined, to such a great extent, the forms of exclusion that actually become built and materially informed.

Kevin Gotkin: It was so amazing to feel like Shannon and I were collaborating by having that article printed on newsprint. And then the way that Shannon described that, that the piece, or the front of the newspaper marked the whole scene. It was incredible to be on the ground and to see documentation of it later, of the way that Shannon's different, again, access aesthetics. The pillows, the hats, the newspapers did this really beautiful subtle intervention into the whole scene.

Kevin Gotkin: It reminded me of an artist, Ricardo Dominguez, who, during the Obama era, I believe, had a project where he would go to the US-Mexico border and smile at the border, because there were many ways in which the regulatory apparatus... Now I'm sure it's even more intense, but under Obama, when it was still horrifying and tragic, it was actually impossible to smile at the border. You would be breaking regulations, and so he would just stand there and smile, and there's a photo, still his faculty photo, of him smiling at the border, and there's a border agent getting out of their car just looking like, "I am going to tackle him." This kind of intervention on the subtle aesthetics of taking up space and being in a place that is designed around exclusion.

Kevin Gotkin: I think the Anti-Stairs Club Lounge takes its place in that legacy and also in the legacy of temporary or mobile libraries or exhibitions that are pop-ups, right? That show the itinerant nature of these kinds of exhibitions as sited everywhere, and also not institutionalized, that they are temporary and they pop up.

Kevin Gotkin: There were so many aspects of that installation that allowed us to be angry and concerned and also be able to be with each other. And that's a kind of aesthetic duality that I think disability artistry captures so well, and that's what Shannon's work has been noted in the New York Times and in Out Magazine's artists. Your work, Shannon, is capturing that complexity that I think more and more folks are starting to understand and see as legible.

Aimi Hamraie: And I'll just throw in there that what I notice when I look at the photos and coverage of the Anti-Stairs Lounge protests at Vessel, and then also the combination with Kevin's article, is that both of you are operating within really a lineage of disability architectural criticism, also. A lot of architectural critics or scholars wouldn't necessarily think of disabled people as architectural reviewers and critics, but actually we are and have been, and there's a history of using protests as architectural criticism too.

Aimi Hamraie: So it's really striking to me here that there's the text of a building review that brings in disability culture, and then the way that it's... I love.. We'll definitely include in the show-notes links to this, but the idea of printing the text on one side of a newsprint and then the other side of it saying Anti-Stairs Club Lounge as a kind of protest sign that people are holding up. That's, to me, very much in the lineage of ADAPT protests and other groups that do disability direct action and have these really nuanced theoretical discussions in very material ways and public spaces.

Shannon Finnegan: Well, and one thing that was really exciting for me to discover... When I had created the project for the Wassaic Project, I had just been thinking about how to give it a distinctive feel. So I was thinking about these different elements to mark the space, and I made this very little simple logo, that was just this crossed-out stairs symbol, and later was watching a documentary about ADAPT and saw that they had the same symbol on a t-shirt that people were wearing at the Capitol Crawl. That was really incredible for me to see that connection and the ways that I think that an anti-stairs mentality has been a part of disability protest, and being part of that lineage was really incredible for me.

Aimi Hamraie: Oh, wow. So that symbol that's a line-drawing of stairs with a...

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah, crossed out.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, crossed-out symbol as part of the Capitol Crawl. That's really cool. I feel like there are a lot of [inaudible 00:33:03] to take that to, and I'll be curious to see how you play with that iconography or use that going forward. I could imagine a bunch of people wearing temporary tattoos and walking around the city with them or rolling around and stuff.

Shannon Finnegan: Well, and one other thing that I was really excited about with the Anti-Stairs Club Lounge at The Vessel is we made these beanies with the crossed-out stairs symbol, but then everyone who participated could take that with them if they wanted to. And I love the way that that disperses the protest and becomes these little mini Anti-Stairs Club Lounges throughout the city, in all of these different moments in places where people are.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that's so great.

Kevin Gotkin: I was just going to say, I was just camping this past weekend, and several of us have lower back issues, so we made sure that our camp setup had back support. Like you were talking about the decision to make sure that the benches had a back for everyone who was there. No one had to feel like they didn't have an option for back support. And at one point, the person who was my editor on the Avery Review piece, was looking for... His color scheme just happened to be orange, and he was like, "Does anybody have an Anti-Stairs Club Lounge beanie? It would be perfect..." And then I was like, "Wait, this is an Anti-Stairs Club." Because we're all thinking about making sure that this whole... It perfectly disperses, so that it's a natural... That's what I love about the club lounge, right? That it's a club. And then every once in a while we assemble in the lounge to hang out together. It's incredible to think about the ways, probably many totally unbeknownst to you, that form and just decentralize, and just start to crop up and automate that, those forms of gatherings.

Aimi Hamraie: I'm struck also by the language of "club" and "lounge," and that's another place where you and Kevin seem to have some synchronicities, because Kevin just wrote that great piece called Crip Club Vibes for Catalyst. So thinking about these spaces of leisure, hanging out, that are not often thought of as disability spaces, or if they are, disability is an add-on or something like that. So do you want to say a little bit more about those terms? Club and lounge?

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. I think, for me, the idea of a club has always been something that I've thought about a lot. One thing I think about is the way that ableism functions by isolating disabled people, and by telling us that our needs and desires are these personal, individual issues, and that any time where you're creating connection between disabled people, that's very political. So the idea of creating a club that marks an alignment, even if it's an alignment around something as vague as being anti-stairs, it seems really exciting to me.

Shannon Finnegan: The idea of a lounge conjures leisure and relaxation and a certain basking that I think is really interesting, and there was a review of Anti-Stairs Club Lounge at the Wassaic Project where someone referred to it in the lineage of a waiting room. It was kind of jarring to me because that's, I think, a really different vibe than what I was going to. I was thinking about it much more around a VIP lounge, or something like that kind of experience. But I think it was just simply around the ways that disability is so medicalized, and so people are always reaching for analogies in medical environments in relation to the work.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, what an interesting point of contrast. The anxiety-ridden waiting room space at the doctor's office or whatever, versus the space that's just welcoming, and there are snacks, and there are places to hang out, and yeah. I was at the Museum of Design Atlanta, probably six or seven years ago, and there was this exhibition on modernist proposals for airports. I think it was Charles and Ray Eames. It could have been another modernist, but in my mind it was them, and they had proposed this thing that I always... Whenever I'm at the airport, which is pretty much the most inaccessible place for me, I always think about this and I'm like, "Oh, wouldn't it have been nice if this ever happened?"

Aimi Hamraie: And it was that instead of having a huge building where you walk for two miles to get to your gate, where you check in, you would load up on this bus that would be a very wide mobile lounge, and it would have drinks and food and there would be... Basically, the flight attendants would be on the lounge. So their work would start at that point. And you would hang out, and there'd be these fun chairs to sit in, because Charles and Ray Eames, they designed all those plywood chairs. They invented the bent plywood kind of thing. You would just go in there and relax, and then when it was time to go to your flight, the lounge would drive you out to the airplane and then you'd get on the airplane.

Aimi Hamraie: And I think about that all the time, because you would totally avoid the sensory experience of an airport, which is... To me it's apocalyptic, like it's just so bad. And there are so many ways that I have to cover myself and protect myself from that. And also there's this user experience thing, and then the furniture, of course. So I just wanted to share that with you, because it seems like a version, in a way, of what you're talking about. But instead of for stairs, it's about walking long distances.

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. Well, and I just love that, even as a vision for transportation of any kind, that it's like, "Let's lounge it up while we're on the go." I guess that's maybe what a limousine is? I don't know.

Aimi Hamraie: Kind of, yeah. I don't think that they got to the point where they were physically producing them. Kind of like a trailer, almost. Like a trailer.

Shannon Finnegan: Incredible.

Aimi Hamraie: [inaudible 00:40:03]. And very space-agey, lots of natural light, low cushioned seating, and bar stools. Like all of that kind of stuff.

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah.

Shannon Finnegan: Being transported is such an access dream. Anytime that I can just be and then get to where I'm trying to go, just feels incredible. I love that idea.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. And so that like the airplane experience, it's an extension of the airplane experience. And I'm sure that back then, airplanes were also way more comfortable than they are now, in terms of seat size and that sort of thing.

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie: But yeah, it's definitely something to think about. And what I had seen in the exhibition was actually this Flintstones... Or Jetsons-style cartoon that they had created that laid out this speculative vision of what this mobile lounge could be like.

Shannon Finnegan: That's amazing.

Aimi Hamraie: So I wonder if you might be able to find it. Kind of related to that, one thing I was noticing as both of y'all were talking is... There's something here about the material textures of... There's like Vessel, and then also of the seating and the beanies and the cushions.

Aimi Hamraie: And it reminded me of another interview that I recorded just a few days ago with Sky Cubacub. Do you know them? They do Rebirth Garments and we were talking about chain mail, like they create chain mail is a kind of queer crip body armor. And there's something that's really interesting about... So Vessel looks like this weird beehive made of stairs, and it's a very porous structure that is somehow part of its aesthetic in the ways that Kevin's pointing out. It's like the aesthetic of endurance or whatever. I don't really know what to say about that sort of material.

Aimi Hamraie: And then there's the materiality of the benches, the plywood benches, which has its own comfort and probably texture and temperature, because it's wood and stuff like that. And then these hats, which are knit, and it seems like maybe there's some intentionality behind the beanie versus some other sort of hat. And then the pillows, which you also mentioned were an iteration after the museum benches. So could you just say a little bit about that? Is there something about woven or cushioned or... How are all these materials are working together or talking to each other somehow?

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah, I don't know if this is exactly an answer to your question, but one thing that I think about a lot in relation to the material choices that I make in my work as this David Hammons quote that goes something along the lines of, "Make it as cheaply as possible and insist that that's the correct aesthetic." And so for me, yeah, just figuring out the simplest, easiest way to do it. And I also think about that quote in relation to my body, and the way that my body affects the way that I make and what I make. I would say the benches are a little bit of an exception to that. Like those are something that's really complicated for me to deal with, like carrying them, transporting them, stuff like that. But yeah, something like the beanies, it's very simple, and kind of easy for me to make, easy for me to transport.

Shannon Finnegan: I think that's something... I'm always thinking about what's right around me. So the cushions that I made for Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, they're Ikea cushions that I then painted and added to and made anti-stairs. But thinking about things that are easy for me to get, easy for me to use, and then using those as building blocks for making things.

Shannon Finnegan: I think the other thing that I would say about in terms of materials, I think it's also about... Handmade-ness has always been important in my work, and I think, for me, sometimes having that attention in the work is... Well, I think about it in two ways. One is that I just love the way that handmade things, for me, just resonate with my body in a certain way, where I love things that are a little skewed or wobbly or asymmetrical. That's just something that, for me, that's like me. I love that. But then also thinking about the way that something handmade can show this care and attention. And so, for example, with Anti-Stairs Club Lounge at the Wassaic project, I really wanted people to come into that space and feel cared for, and that they were in a space that had been really intentionally created for them.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. Cool. So that's a good segue, I think, into this point that came up earlier that I wanted to circle back to, about creating work that's primarily for disability culture and for other disabled people. Would you like to say more about that?

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah, I think I'm someone who grew up really isolated from other disabled people. There were never really... I grew up in Berkeley, California, right in the center of all of this amazing disability culture. And I was never encouraged to connect with other disabled people to find disabled role models, and that was hard for me. As I got older, and through disability studies, that was the point where I even understood that my experience was culturally shaped and shared. I hadn't even really realized that growing up. I think I had this experience around disability where I just didn't feel like I learned anything about disability from mainstream culture, but through the writing and thinking and art of other disabled people. There was this kind of mirroring that happened where I felt like I was able to understand myself and the way I moved through the world in a really different way.

Shannon Finnegan: And so I think, for me, being part of that process is the most exciting thing that can happen with my work. Making a thought or a feeling tangible in a different way or valid in a way that it is not in mainstream spaces. That, for me, is really why I think about other disabled people as the core audience for my work, is because I really want to make something that is for us. I've talked to other disabled artists about this. The teaching and the reaching out to non-disabled people can be so exhausting to constantly be reiterating these very basic ideas that disabled people have been talking about for decades.

Shannon Finnegan: It also feels like a little bit of a shortcut in some ways to, instead of continuing to go back to those basics, to create this really vibrant internally-facing culture, that non-disabled people can be on the outside looking in, and they can see how exciting and rich and interesting it is. But we don't have to continually explain or check in with them and be like, "Oh, do you get this? Are you with us on this?" And that helps us operate at more of the level that we are at as a community, in terms of our understanding of how the world should be.

Kevin Gotkin: Yeah. I think in the activist work we've been doing, one of the major trends I see is non-disabled people believing that the best and most humble way to approach the learning that they need to do is by deferring the work itself, actually. So a lot of folks will say like, "I don't know anything about this." And as a scholar, I'm like, "You do know a lot about disability, in fact, because disability, ableism is public culture." So even if your learning was in gym class when you were younger, you actually do know a lot. There's a status assigned to disability from the beginning, that people think, "I am an outsider as a non-disabled person."

Kevin Gotkin: And in some ways that's true, but I think the hurdle that we are constantly faced with is how to get non-disabled people to recognize that they don't need to and can't continue to defer the work of undoing ableism to disabled people, which is exhausting. As Shannon said, it's often uncompensated. It's a lot of coffee dates, where some people are like, "Tell me, tell me, tell me..." By the end, you don't really get the sense that they're going to actually go back and do the reading and do the advocacy. So creating work that's just like, "Y'all can come and hang out and watch and experience if you want, but you're not the audience." Like, "You're not the specific audience and we don't need to teach you," is a huge shift.

Kevin Gotkin: And it also... One of the buzzwords in disability or diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI initiatives, in the art world, I think, in New York, but also broader than that, is the buzzword would be placemaking. A lot of people think this is what we need to do. Recognize geospatial distributions of various ethnic or racial communities, and for disability community that doesn't... What placemaking means to a lot of funders and activists isn't the same, right? Because disability isn't one community that is sited, especially in New York, where transportation is such a major problem for organizing on a basic level, you just can't guarantee that physical co-location is the way to organize. And of course, there's many ways that disability and incarceration determine disability culture. So the disabling forces at work in mass incarceration and the limits to what kinds of, again, placemaking is possible when people do not have the freedom for their own mobility.

Kevin Gotkin: So it's amazing that there's so many projects that are doing what Shannon has been doing where it's just decentralizing and decentering the idea that one place is the... The amazing paradox or contradiction in the club lounge is that it's not one space, right? That you take things home. You take the beanie home. You take the pillow home. It goes out. It goes around, and those become natural resources, I feel like, in crip community building. That you're always sharing the heating pad, and the couch that people need to come and hang on.

Kevin Gotkin: I engage with a lot of folks who are using other models that they see might work for diversity, equity and inclusion in other initiatives. And I'm just like, "It needs to be completely recalibrated for disability inclusion and justice." And that's where Shannon's work is so instructive, right? That it's really helpful to say, "Here's what we mean by placemaking." Place itself needs to be completely reevaluated.

Aimi Hamraie: I also want to bring another dimension into this idea of creating art for disability culture. Thinking about Shannon, your work specifically, and the two pieces that we've talked about so far, the benches and then also the mobile lounge, and the way that other people, who may not be part of disability culture or maybe they are, are called in to make commitments. So there's the "sit if you agree" on the benches, and then signing the pledge, and it's sort of like you're recruiting for disability culture, and giving people a way to be like, "Yes, I opt in to this." So...

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah, I think it's always fascinating to see non-disabled people's responses to these very basic commitments that are required there, both at the Wassaic Project and at The Vessel. There are a lot of non-disabled people who are like, "Well, but I want to be part of it, but I don't want to do it." And that's always really interesting for me to see that hesitancy, and the way that so many things are open to non-disabled people that having even these really small barriers can be very jarring for people.

Shannon Finnegan: I think it's just important for me in the work to be like, "You can be part of this. What we're doing is exciting and great and, yes, welcome. But you can't just flit in and out. You do have to make some sort of commitment to this, and show some solidarity around this in order to be part of this with us."

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, that a lot of non-disabled people may assume that there should just be access to everything, or that everything is for them. And there are many types of spaces that we would create that are for marginalized communities specifically and first. And it seems like you're doing something that allows people who are not part of those communities to still access those spaces if they're willing to do the work.

Aimi Hamraie: So I wonder if we could transition now to talking about some new and upcoming projects that you have going on. Are there any that you want to share with us?

Shannon Finnegan: I'm currently a resident at Eyebeam in Brooklyn, New York. And here I've been doing a project about image description and alt text. Again, going back to what I was talking about in terms of being someone whose practice has been very visually oriented and trying to figure out what my role is in making my work accessible and how I can be part of that process.

Shannon Finnegan: The project that I've been doing here is three-part, but the first part was developing this workshop curriculum around the idea of alt text as poetry, which is I think honestly a pretty old idea in disability community. The idea that descriptive text can be poetic and creative and a kind of generative practice, but specifically trying to engage with artists around that idea, and getting artists to think about either writing description for their own work, or collaborating with specific people and designing what that description is like.

Shannon Finnegan: And then also just on a logistical level, I think that artists have... There's potential for artists to drive change in this area, which... There's this practice that comes up all the time when you send images, and you send an image to a gallery, and you send the title and the dimensions and the materials and the year. And so what happens if artists are also sending the alt text with the image, that it really starts to travel with the image and then what that prompts for the gallery in terms of understanding their own specifically web accessibility and accessibility on social media. There's also basically a workbook version of that. So just a different kind of mode of distributing that information.

Shannon Finnegan: And then the next part of the project, which I'm really excited about, is going to be basically like an online group exhibition. So 8 to 15 artists, but all of the imagery of the work will be absent, and it will only be experienced through description, and you'll have the option to switch between different describers. So described by the artists, described by each of the curators. I'll work with a poet to do a set of description. There may be other describers. And I think that project will be themed around portraiture, and that's an area of description that I think is really interesting and unresolved, which is how we see ourselves and how we want to be represented to the world aligns with how other people perceive us. Hopefully, that project will explore that a little bit.

Aimi Hamraie: Oh, that's great. I think that that... I can already imagine the intervention and conversation that that would contribute to, because there's such a debate, for example, around... If you're describing people, do you specify their race and their gender and their disability if it's apparent, like that kind of stuff. And some people really think like, "No, you should never do that," and there are two... There are the people who think you shouldn't do that because you should only... A description should only be objective, and whatever, objective... I'm saying that like in scare quotes.

Aimi Hamraie: And then there are also the people who are like, "Don't assume my gender, and don't assume my race." And so portraiture is pretty much almost entirely about those kinds of "presentation of self" sorts of things. So it'll be really interesting to use that project also as an example in having these conversations, or training people to do alt text descriptions and stuff.

Shannon Finnegan: Yeah. I think my feeling about description in general has been like, we just need more people who are engaged in this practice. We as a culture have not built our collective toolkit around what this practice is and how we approach it. Part of the larger goal with this project is just to get more people doing it, so that we can learn from each other and try to figure out different ways of approaching it.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Shannon, for making the time to talk to us about your work, which is so amazing and exciting, and I'm really excited to share this conversation with other folks too, so that they can be thinking about these things.

Shannon Finnegan: It was, yes, absolutely my pleasure. It's so exciting to have these conversations with other people who are thinking about the same topics, because there's just such a richness to them and so exciting to hear both of your thoughts on some of the things. And so, yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Introducing Crip Ritual:

All cultures have rituals. Rituals can be ways to change material circumstances, politics, lived experience, or even spiritual realities. So rituals are a method for designing a better world. In disability culture, we often use rituals as ways of designing and anticipating a more accessible future. What role does ritual play in your life, and what rituals could you imagine designing to ensure a better future for you and other members of disability culture and community? The Critical Design Lab invites submissions to an art exhibition called Crip Ritual, which will be on display in Spring 2021. You can submit your artworks to the exhibition for consideration via our website, www.CripRitual.com, or participate on social media using #CripRitual.

Outro:

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