Exploring the impact of disability in Enfield

Kazimir Bielecki of Enfield art group Dyspla presents his latest local project

Enfield is disabled, Enfield is shame, disabled is pride, Enfield is pride, disabled is shame.

Whether now or in the future, whether you were born with or developed a disability, you will be disabled. Perception and fear guide these claims, one too often overpowering the other, resulting in an erasure of difference, of the aesthetics of disability.

If you feel socially disabled and live in Enfield, please join our free art workshops. We’re Dyspla, an award-winning, disabled-led arts studio based in Enfield, and we’ve been awarded an artist residency with Arbeit Studios, supported by Enfield Council, exploring our disabled community.

Just to be seen smiling, with a luscious complexion, our erratic voices are too often silenced, and we think there are more of us out there than the statistics tell us. Found in the precariousness of identity exposure, in a world where disability is demonized, if you are disabled by society and want to share your story, we want to hear from you. We will be working together to build a collection of artworks about life as disabled people in Enfield for exhibition in August.

We have been continuously supported by Arts Council England to create our important work for eleven years and long to continue, but we have recently become aware that our disability art is disrupting the status quo. In the last two years, our artworks have been ‘removed’ (in one case demolished) from three UK institutions because of the aesthetics of disability within the work. Described by one as “monstrous”, “not art” and “too political” by another, the exclusion of each was insidious and ideologically motivated by “liberal” organizations claiming to support marginalized communities. When confronted with works of art that challenged orthodoxy, it was eradicated from view.

The story of “erasure” is one all too often lived in all our lives. It happens in many contexts, from politics to education; it is the uncomfortable, dialectical or visual views that become silenced and ghosted to avoid controversy. Dissident rhetoric made to apologize and pushed into narrow unipolar narratives.

On the eve of a new British government, we will all experience a singular story based on a binary concept of good and evil. Those who triumph beautifully create a new world in their own image, the unsightly outsider is pushed backstage and banished.
Although we will all become disabled at some point in our lives, the story of disability in Enfield is one that is rarely told and too often avoided. Enfield is disabled will share the narrative of unheard, unseen.

Contact Dyspla:
Call 07917157748
Visit dyspla.com/disabled

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