Rise Over Run
Installation, 2024
Collaboration with Atanas Bozdarov & A.S.M. Kobayashi
Atanas Bozdarov and A.S.M. Kobayashi explore urban accessibility infrastructures and their use by both the disability community and skateboarders. This public installation features a custom-built, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA)-compliant ramp that invites audience members to walk on and engage with a series of texts composed along the ramp’s surface. Additionally, the installation also incorporates a series of skateboarding ramps, similarly adorned with text, which will be activated by users with wheels. The ramps are designed in collaboration with the StopGap Foundation, drawing inspiration from their portable, colourful accessibility ramps, which inject a sense of play and levity into the typically rigid constraints and barriers of the built environment. Quotes from writers, artists, practitioners, and activists, including in the disability and skateboarding communities, are displayed on the ramps and featured in an online video, where Bozdarov and Kobayashi read them aloud. These curated reflections further emphasize the intersections and commonalities between the disability and skateboarding communities. These conversations provoke reflection on movement, access and inclusion, and touch on how these individuals have learned to be resilient and creative in their hacks and navigation of the spaces that actively exclude them. The intention of this work is for audiences to further engage in this dialogue and continue the projects’ ideas beyond the night’s temporary installation. “Rise Over Run” explores design for intersecting needs and was initiated by the artists’ observations of accessibility structures and their appropriation by skateboarders.
Acknowledgements
Curator: Su-Ying Lee; Producers: Adrian Kent, Pratishtha Kohli; Collaborators and Consultants: Neill Forrest Raymond Sturgess, Luke Anderson from StopGap Foundation; Graphic Design: Bartosz Gawdzik; Soundtrack: Dj Stew Innes; Quotations from Interviews and Writings of Luke Anderson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jeremy Klemin, bell hooks, Marta Russell, Iain Borden, Duncan McDuie-Ra, Sarah Hendren, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Aimi Hamraie, and s.e. smith.
Thank you
Sisters of Shred, Elisha Muskat, Lisa Carrie Goldberg, Alicia den Ouden, Alison Cooley, Queer Skate Toronto, Yumi Lee, Julianna Stein, Goodpush, Johny Bozdarov, Emily Dickson, George Kobayashi, Eleanor Kobayashi, Erin Kobayashi, Marietta Gawdzik, Karol Dyda, Tisha Myles, David Poolman, Justin Waddell, John Barnes.