When Language Becomes Currency: Access as an Aesthetic, a Practice, a Possibility
- lauraarena8
- Dec 8, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 9, 2025
I just finished a month-long residency at Live Art Ireland, part of a program titled “Cultivating Queer Disabled Visions.” The description sounded like the kind of program I’ve been searching for as an Indigenous, queer, disabled artist:
A mentored residency where queer, disabled visions would be “cultivated” through environmental storytelling and embodied practice. A space where we would “discover pathways to resilience and healing pleasure,” move within an “immersive sanctuary,” and share “communal movement rituals that center joy and nourishment.”
This is the program description.
This was the text used for funding applications. This was the text that attracted the artists. It was also a text that our workshop host, Tara Carroll from Chronic Art Collective, had no input into, despite being listed as the person facilitating the workshops. The text was based on the project description by Petra Kuppers, who initially proposed the program but later was not able to facilitate. The text was then adapted by Live Art Ireland.
As part of the workshop, we sat together and read the description aloud. Then we began to pull it apart.
We wrote down words that felt inflated, vague, or suspiciously familiar:
healing
resilience
sanctuary
immersive
nourishment
pleasure
community
connection
embodiment
environmental storytelling
queer
Each word went onto a sheet of paper. The more people wanted to talk about it, the bigger the paper. Very quickly, the table was covered. What emerged was a living map of the vocabulary of contemporary “socially engaged” art.
Looking at this language as a whole, it became obvious: these are not just descriptive words. They are funding words.
They allow a single program to hit multiple institutional targets at once:
Disability
Queerness
Environmental concern
Community, care, and healing
Social practice / live art
The text reads like an optimized accumulation of all the “right” concepts. It’s the kind of language that AI can now generate and remix with ease. Smooth, poetic, inclusive, full of promise.
And yet, language alone does not create access, care, or safety. Healing does not happen just because you write “healing pleasure” in the project description. Resilience is not produced by invoking resilience. Sanctuary is not created by calling a residency “an immersive sanctuary.”
For disabled and chronically ill artists, the cost of this disconnect is material. We organize our limited energy around programs that promise support, rest, and nourishment. We travel, uproot ourselves, change routines. When reality doesn't match the text, the impact isn't just disappointment; it’s exhaustion, flare-ups, and destabilisation.
In this residency, more than half my time was spent feeling unwell. My needs were not met at times. On occasion, I felt unsafe. I did not encounter the sanctuary, the healing pleasure, or the carefully held environment that had been promised.
What I did encounter was something I recognize across the art world: the use of queer and disabled language as aesthetic, as branding, as currency within capitalism.
Words like “queer,” “disabled,” “healing,” “resilience,” and “care” are now deeply embedded in the cultural economy. They increase an institution’s perceived progressiveness. They help secure funding. They create desirable optics—without necessarily transforming the underlying structures that shape disabled and queer people’s actual experiences in those spaces.
As someone whose practice is rooted in decolonial work and Indigenous ways of knowing, this is particularly painful. I have spent years trying to unlearn colonial frameworks, to center embodied knowledge, to imagine collective spaces of listening and repair.
And yet I see how easily I, too, can be pulled into this language: using the same words in my own proposals, statements, and bios, just to remain legible to institutions.
The question becomes:
When are these words describing a lived reality—and when are they simply performing care within a capitalist art system?
Until art organisations are willing to align their structures with their language—budgets, schedules, staffing, access needs, rest, repair—these words will remain unstable. They will continue to function as a kind of soft violence: promising care while outsourcing the risk and the cost back onto disabled and queer bodies.
I leave this residency exhausted and unwell, but clearer. Clearer about how language is being deployed around disability and queerness, and clearer that my work now must also include challenging that deployment. Not only out there in institutions, but inside my own practice and the words I choose to use.
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