This residency left me feeling in awe of the soft body and what it does. How we move and be still when the conditions coalesce for our ease. And for the space to be generative, not just in service of a baseline. Allowing the soft body to be and do. We deserve space to be in holistic cycles of renewal. Our collective ease is a garden. 

We are all composters of the stories that make us up. Of lineages, bloodlines, places, chosen ancestors, freedom fights and struggles. Empire seeks to atomise and sever these connections, alienation on multiple scales serving but not exempting the golden circle with its violence. Access is then invisibilised inside hegemony, the highly specific access requirements of some serviced and naturalised.

There is an assemblage of access that provides our quotidian experience. The crip cartographer traces this from the hostility of the concrete sidewalk to the administrative burden of services. The web of potentials that disappears anyone not hard enough to weather these conditions. There is a dissonance in how much coordination, subversion, and appropriation of material resources has to go into the moment for the soft body to just be. Access is not an addition, but a rearrangement that requires exasperating labour and disruption. And the lattice of hegemonic access white-knuckles and buckles with defiance at our demands to come to this moment of ease. 

Access is practice is access is practise. Readiness to ease, to divest, is a disabled skill. The honesty of coming to that together and denying isolation, is a disabled skill. And a threatening one. Not threatening to the pulse of the ocean, unfurling fern tendrils or olive trees; but to Empire and its agents keeping us alienated from our bodies, from each other and land. Moments of immense intimacy humble me in the presence of my disabled kin. I witness expertise in refusal, and in the tender art of sharing. The interpersonal sets the scene for the systemic, ricocheting out into emergent worlds that we dream and yearn in futures, but form in the ongoing present, already in motion. In a glimmer of ease, our soft body leads, and something else becomes possible. Together.