D4D: Electric Bodies - 'A Different Way of Engaging' poetry and interview content

D4D (Disability and Community: Dis/engagement, Dis/enfranchisement, Dis/parity and Dissent) was a four year AHRC Connected Communities project investigating issues around disability and community.

Electric Bodies was one of the eight project strands. It explored the relationship between the disabled artist and the disability arts community through a series of extensive life history interviews edited into transcription poetry cycles.

'A Different Way of Engaging' is a cycle of transcription poems written by Allan Sutherland. They are based on interviews conducted by Sutherland with the late Katherine Araniello, a performance and video artist.

The poems cover Araniello's childhood and experience of segregated education, her move to independent living, and her acquisition of a formal artistic education. She was strongly critical of what she saw as the 'community arts' focus of Disability Arts and wanted to make work that had a rigorous intellectual grounding. She worked under her own name, as SickBitchCrips, and with Aaron Williamson, as the Disabled Avant-Garde. Araniello refused to discuss the 'meaning' of her work with anybody; she felt it should stand for itself. But in these interviews she describes her working methods, her partnership with Williamson, and the thinking behind some key works.

The poems were completed shortly before Araniello's death in February 2017.

This item contains the following files:

The poems (PDF)

Recording of Allan Sutherland reading the poems (MP3)

Transcript of the interviews (PDF)

Audio of the interviews (3 x MP3)