At the heart of Arts Beyond Ableism lies the theme of unlearning ableism in the arts: how artists and educators can help challenge biases against people with disabilities in art, education, and society. The second edition of this event, Arts Beyond Ableism Vol. 2, was co-organized with Mediamatic and took place on October 24, 2024. Unlike the large-scale first edition, this gathering was intimate, featuring educators and staff from the Amsterdam University of the Arts alongside external participants.

a/Artist Project
Mediamatic contributed to the event with their a/Artist project, a platform for neurodivergent artists and designers to explore how we can better value the contributions of makers "on the spectrum" and how we can support each other in doing so.

Two a/Artist contributors shared their work:

Vera Lelie
Vera Lelie (BEPA) is a fashion designer and recent graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She writes about her graduation work ‘The waiting room’: "When looking at a garment as a space, you see that, like in architectural design, there are many ways in which garments can be made more accessible. My relationship to clothes is shaped by my neurodiverse perception. I mute and extract information in order not to get overstimulated. I create static by fixating shapes and silhouettes as a contrast to my hyperactivity. I hyperfixate on subjects in my research, using my hyper awareness of surroundings to create environments that blur the line: where does a garment begin and a room end?"

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Jenny Konrad
Jenny Konrad is a visual translator of information who researches and appropriates methods, medias, tools and materials to transform raw content into experiences that are digestible to constantly overstimulated minds and understimulated bodies. Currently they are exploring the role of the body in our increasingly virtualized and physically estranged capitalist culture to initiate connection between (self-)alienated body/minds towards a culture of communal care. Through a focus on sensory perception and embodied cognition Konrad aims to find alternative ways beyond traditional and digital journalistic media, pushing the boundaries of storytelling and expanding towards a multi sensory cultural praxis.

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