What we call ‘disability’ has the potential to challenge our accustomed ways of thinking about individuality, normality, and care. Unusual assemblages of bodies and technologies, communication forms outside the norm, and lived dependencies on others open multifaceted perspectives onto what we call ‘human’. Whether disabled or not, humans use technology and need the support of others to take part in the world. Or as Donna Haraway puts it: “We’re always in the thick of it”. We have never been autonomous.
People with disabilities live in a close-knit community with technological, social, and human actors. They are part of a network, in which autonomy and agency are not so much possessed as shared. Looking through the prism of dis/ability enables subtle and imaginative perspectives on the interconnections between prostheses and bodies, capabilities and incapabilities, help and ethics.
The Blackmarket attempts to bring together areas, which generally do not belong together in public perception: the reality of physical and mental disability with critical visions on the future of the body and society.