Bioart + Design Africa

VIAD

Imminent and Eminent Ecologies

General Artist Statement

I bring the intimate experience of disability, medical interventions and recovery into art form. I'm fascinated by the sociopolitical potential of this research which supports, expands and archives, breaking tropes and challenging the assumed monolith of disabled experience. My performance work subverts ableist narratives, suggesting new paradigms of viewing and understanding a queer, disabled, older body and its relationship to patriarchy, ableism etc. I pull tight focus on singular stories from my lived experience, but also from other disabled persons and trauma survivors, analysing them through the lens of critical theory to expose the cognitive dissonance around cancer, disability and our own mortality. In return for being labelled with diagnoses and prognoses I have no control over, as they belong to an unassailable canon of western patriarchal medical science, I offer nuanced diagnoses, on the personal, but also the socio-cultural pathologies which perpetuate physical and also mental illness, such as ableism, misogyny, ageism and queer phobia. As a performer I invite the witness' gaze, subverting the ableist stare, exposing prejudice, demanding that the witness looks, that they see a body which holds autonomy. As a therapist and educator in the field of conflict resolution and transformative justice, I wish to broaden queer Crip culture and create a haven for disabled people who find allyship, validation and recognition within my research, and be part of the creation of new communities based on equality, decolonised and posthuman theory. 

Artist Statement on Capitalist Machine

Join Louise Westerhout (and their avatar Cyborg Witch) on the one-year anniversary of their stem cell transplant. They take stock of the multitude of adaptations (two mega prostheses, chemical alterations from over 50 bags of cytotoxic chemotherapy, litres and litres of other peoples’ precious O negative blood), the trauma, the memories, the Crip-queer praxis, and, finally, adventure to faraway lands. Louise may not be separated from their research and practice as they are living artifact and biochemical sculpture.

Louise and Cyborg Witch are emic and etic, one lives in a post-cancer survivor realism and the other, well, is it magic or post-traumatic dissociation? This is a 6 week durational immersion within the social media platform, Instagram. This format allows the viewer intimate access, but always one controlled by Louise. In this way, the content is accessible to all who may not physically have access to the gallery – i.e. disabled folks – yet it also acts to educate and subvert the ableist gaze by rendering, editing and refining images and text, suggesting new ways to understand disability away from the violence of the ableist monolith that is ‘trauma porn’. These Instagram posts range from archives, scans and memories of the stem cell transplant,  musings on intersectional activism, providing cutting edge diagnosis on the socio-cultural pathologies they encounter, as well as navigating geographic and existential travel in a cyborg Crip format.