Unsettled Ground: Art, Disability, and the Need for Space

I am moving again. Movers are late, boxes are everywhere, and what feels like a simple logistical shift turns out to be a larger, unresolved story. I’m getting evicted — this time from my art studio. I have a studio apartment, already overflowing with the necessities of daily life, and for comfort and recovery. Now I’m expected to compress an entire art practice into this already-full space.

How do you continue to make work when the space to make it disappears?

Since my traumatic brain injury, movement has become a constant theme of my life. I moved directly into a new apartment after leaving the rehab hospital — though part of me wanted to stay there because I sensed what was coming: instability. I was right. Last year alone, I moved through five different apartments, plus the art studio I am now losing. Each move disrupts healing, routine, and the fragile calm my brain needs to recover.

Berlin in the past had endless space for artists, but now it is only a fantasy, not built for those living with disability, limited income, or unpredictable needs. There is a crisis of space here, and artists feel it sharply. We require more than a home. We require room to experiment, to fail, to build, to store the tangible evidence of all the ways we think.

Space is not neutral.

Space determines who gets to call themselves an artist.

I often ask myself: Why is recovery taking so long? Why does restarting my art practice feel like learning to walk again — on uneven ground? And the answer always returns to the basics: I am still fighting for foundational stability. Savings can only stretch so far in a city where the cost of space exceeds the value placed on art. As a disabled person, adapting to each new environment is not simply inconvenient — it is cognitively exhausting. My brain remains occupied by survival logistics rather than creative vision.

There should be better ways to support artists who are disabled, who are healing, who need more than inspiration — who need infrastructure.

When I settle into one place, I heal. And when a studio supports my needs — a spot to lie down when symptoms flare, a safe place to rest during long hours of making — I sustain my work. My body demands pauses, but the world of contemporary art insists on uninterrupted production.

I expend almost all my energy securing the conditions for making art, leaving little energy actually to make it.

What does it mean to be an artist when your most excellent creative output becomes survival?

I am trying to hold onto the belief that this isn’t the end of possibility, but the messy middle. That belonging and stability are not luxuries — they are access needs. And that perhaps the act of moving, again and again, is a reminder of what we collectively lack: systems of care, spatial equity, and recognition that disabled artists exist—and deserve room to thrive.

Until then, I’m packing my art career into cardboard once more and putting it in storage, holding space only in my mind for the work that still wants to exist.