Eva Egermann

Touching Crip History

The focus of the research project Touching Crip History, lies on the intersection of dis/ability and the temporal. Through experimental artistic means, this project seeks to uncover, ‘touch’ and actualize the affinities and re-significations inherent in alternative histories of ‘Dis/ability’ and ‘Crip’ countercurrents.

Disability Studies have pointed to how the social and cultural construction of a ‘abnormal’ and ‘other’ was functional in the normative and strategic alignment of western Modernity as the denial of bodily diversity and difference and the projection of normality as one of able-bodied-ness. The history of embodied difference is, as Homi Bhabha has conceptualized it, is a story not of unilateral domination but of uncertainty, hybridity and ongoing conflict and negotiation. Impairments, injuries and deviations—as well as appropriations and resistances—have acted consistently as a countercurrent to dominant normative temporal orders.

History acts on us in many different ways. As a methodology, ‘touching history’ refers to a practice of searching, digging, reading, writing, desiring, breaking, and shaking things in order to open up the ways we are affected by the past in the present. Different medias, spaces and formats will be tested within Touching Crip History’s research frame, including a periodical publication, development of an archive of historical material, and an experimental approach to exhibition contexts. Through a course of empathic research, Touching Crip History seeks to make contact with the past conflicts and negotiations undertaken by disabled persons, the anachronistic sites of resistances they have occupied.

Eva Egermann (*1979) works as an artist and researcher based in Vienna. She has been working in various medias and collectives, as for instance in the framework of the Manoa Free University or other individual collaborations. In these contexts she developed artistic works as well as curatorial projects and publications. She published the books „school works“ and „class works“, contributions to an educative, artistic and researching practice (with Anna Pritz) and curated the exhibition project “2 or 3 things we’ve learned. Intersections of Art, Pedagogy and Protest…” (with Elke Krasny). She was involved in the project “Model House—Mapping Transcultural Modernisms” and publishes the “Crip Magazine”. She is currently lecturer and PhD in practice student at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.