Kaiya Waerea

Crip theory takes the medical othering of the disabled body and uses this as a starting point from which to conceive of an identity politic. Here, I work through that crip might mean as a practice, looking to artists, writers, designers and theorists who are imagining disability differently. Through ten sections, each celebrating a different verb — ruptures, time travels, misfits, luxuriates, bewitches, protests, lusts, memes, documents, and persists — I use these verbs as a lens to think about what crip can do. The present reality that disabled people face is murderous, the sites, systems and objects we encounter operating through what Rosemarie Garland-Thompson calls eugenics logic. In the face of this, disabled creative practitioners are making work which resists dire social norms and imagines futures which centre and support difference, instead of eradicating it. Crip theory understands the disabled body as a starting point for reconfiguring selfhood. Here I show how it is also a site for reimagining the economy, ecology and power.

Cover sticker illustrations by Tommy Brentnall, single A4 copy bound for the occasion of RCA2022 degree show.

Bitches, Witches & Dykes was a women liberation magazine which ran in New Zealand from 1980–82. I encountered it quite by coincidence, browsing the shelves of the Feminist Library in Peckham, the yellowing, crumbling pages as far away from their origin as I am. 

Within Bitches Witches & Dykes operates a separately edited segment titled ‘The Black Forum’, and through examining the life of this segment and the paper more broadly I explore notions of diaspora and intergenerational loss through an archival encounter. Across three timescales I look to other wahine Māori writers and activists to examine Māori identity and oppression, and how this plays out in the patterns of my own genealogy, circling ideas of movement, distribution, diaspora, bodies, print, water, and knowledge.

This piece — originally presented in audio — is a response to a photograph from Pitt Rivers Museums photo archive. The title means she is my ancestor, she is my daughter, and is a grappling with what Audre Lorde writes in ‘Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’: 

“… the strength of women lies in recognising differences between us as creative, and in standing up to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter.”

The holes which tear and appear in our whakapapa can be tended to, allowed to heal, or left to fester, grow, darken, passed down again. Through thinking with this photograph I attempted to begin approaching these holes, prodding them carefully, coming up, continuously, against colonial technologies; the screen, the archive, the google image search, the email exchanges. 

Erosion, time, water, knowledge, 

land, dryness, silence. Sickness, streaming. 

This monologue was written for a task about object hood, voice, and direction. 

In November of 2020, we were given a brief to write about ‘place’. That winter already felt like it had been going on for so long, and as the second wave of covid was picking up pace in the UK, the future was forshortened. On the day I wrote this I was visiting the RCA library for the first time, having booked one of the six available study slots, and had barely written for months, barely written since beginning this programme from my bedroom. 

The movement, the change of locations, the travel from my home in south east London to this new place which I was supposed to feel apart of dislodged something in me, and when I was settled at my allotted desk in the Kensington Library, I wrote this start to finish.