Carmen Papalia: Open Access 
12 - 3pm 

In 2015, Vancouver-based artist and disability activist Carmen Papalia produced Open Access, a conceptual work consisting of five tenets that describe a relational practice concerning the agreement to support others. The work models a new paradigm for accessibility that centers care, mutuality, and the responsibility for those present to interrupt the conditions that obstruct agency for those in need. A critique of institutional models for accessibility – which the artist maintains are prescriptive and marginalizing by design – Open Access problematizes the typical roles of support by encouraging participants to share accountability, practice mutual aid, and organize for accessibility from the grassroots. Since he first proposed it in 2015, Papalia has employed Open Access as: a private agreement for support, a cross-country movement building campaign, and a methodology for assessing the conditions of institutional access and publicness.

 On July 19, Papalia will conduct a follow-up workshop to the series of engagements that he presented last summer at the 8th Floor sharing developments from his last year traveling with the Open Access 
movement building campaign. The program will establish a space for considerations of agency and power in relation to the social, cultural, and political conditions that inform institutional access and publicness, culminating in an exercise in which participants will realize new potentials for Open Access in their communities.