An Unfolding Revolution toward Widespread Flourishing. Patricia.

Patricia and I initially connected through the Canadian Art Therapy Association and an InnerArt workshop we both attended. More recently our supervision-related work through the Toronto Art Therapy Institute and our art therapy association volunteer tasks have reconnected us in many additional ways. From that place of shared experiences, interests, and similar motivations, rich discussions have been generated, particularly around creativity, accessibility and the field of art therapy. We’ve enjoyed the reciprocal nature of sharing resources, art, and ideas around our various creative practices.

After seeing Patricia’s individual altered book images showcased on instagram, I was very excited about posting a story related to these meaningful reflective mixed-media pages. Patricia incorporates many layers of intention and depth of exploration within this project where source material and content are woven into response art by means of deconstruction, stratification and alteration. Below is an excerpt from an assignment for Patricia’s first year coursework in the Critical Disability Studies PhD Program. Her narrative was written in response to the book’s alteration process being shown during a departmental conference in 2019. I feel honoured Patricia has chosen to share her incredibly powerful imagery and story with us. Thanks for sharing Patricia.

An Unfolding Revolution toward Widespread Flourishing.

Patricia Ki (2019) – altered book (India ink, embroidery and crochet on paper, 9.5” x 40”)

Ghosts in the Bones.

“Ask the colonial ghosts if they live in your bones
Ask the colonial ghosts if they live in your bones
Ask the colonial ghosts what they took
And they’ll tell you that
You’re dancing on it. You’re dancing on it.”

— Rae Spoon, Come on Forest Fire, Burn the Disco Down

Alexis Shotwell (2016) draws on this song by Rae Spoon and writes that “[whether] and how ghosts live in our bones depends on our family histories … any reckoning with the past that we carry in our present involves crafting some way to inventory the ghosts in our bones, and some way to understand what colonialism took” (p. 23).

The idea to create this work was initially sparked by Shotwell’s retelling of former prime minister Stephen Harper’s formal apology in 2008 regarding the Indian Residential Schools, in which generations of trauma, genocidal policies and practices, and violent destruction of dignity, livelihoods and lives, were framed within the words, “a sad chapter in our history” (p. 31). This then paved the way to his 2009 statement that Canada has “no history of colonialism” (ibid.).

This work is to explode the chapter. It finds expressions for devastations, and deconstruct the frame itself by ripping apart, forcing open, cutting through. Inevitably, through the process of cutting and reshaping, new forms emerge from the pages, demanding that new materials be added. They grow, spread, take over, though they will never fully be outside of or detached from the frame (Ahmed, 2017; Butler, 1993).

The part of the book where all the pages are glued together is called a spine. Bones that hold up the rest of the bones, encasing the central nervous system, sending signals to the rest of the body, animating muscles, sinews, flesh, ways of being. The ghosts in the bones allow some ways of being while prohibiting others.

I try to imagine what violence, trauma, and devastation look like in the framing of a book, in the context of stories, where all our stories are connected at the spine. I imagine that it might be like spilling ink on a single page. It seeps through all the other pages, and spreads across time and space, where violence in the past re-emerges over and over again in the present, permeating every story. We share this devastated place, what Anna Tsing calls “blasted landscape” (Shotwell, 2016, p. 9), a world ruined by colonial and capitalist conquests (Tsing, 2012). Yet our stories are haunted by the ghosts of colonialism and violence in different ways, depending on our histories and how we are situated within relations of power and domination (Shotwell, 2016).

Treading/threading lightly.

If ghosts are understood as colonial histories, continuities, and patterns of violence, they also exist in the walls of institutions and social structures, the mechanisms of power, the boundaries of what is acceptable and desirable. How do we oppose the very system that we benefit from (Chapman, 2013)? How do we dismantle the structures upon which we build our livelihoods (Ahmed, 2017)?

My grandmother taught my mother how to sew, knit, and crochet, knowledge that my mother then passed on to me when I was a child. Stitching by hand, and making art in general, are deemed unproductive unless products are created for profit (Taylor, 2004). Stitching as a craft often practiced by women, and the relational space that it generates through crafting together or teaching each other, are devalued, as the emotionality and unwaged work of women have historically been devalued and dismissed (Federici, 2004; Shildrick, 1997).

Adding stitching onto the book pages is therefore an act of defiant as well as a practice of commemoration and unforgetting (Shotwell, 2016). However, stitching into old book pages that are already damaged by ink and water requires that I tread, or thread, lightly. Stitching inevitably requires a surface to hold the threads that traverse through. I need these pages, this ruined landscape. I cannot sew on air (or can I?). Defiant new growths and ruined landscapes are therefore entangled together, impossible to separate.

I think about my grandmother and her outspoken ways yet never in complete opposition to my grandfather or her sons, for the most part because she was economically dependent on them. I think of the women, trans and non-binary folks I worked with in the community and the constant negotiation between compliance and resistance in their relationships with professionals who had control over their disability benefits, housing, healthcare. I think of my own engagement with psychiatry as both a former patient and a worker, and how I know to be a good client who is easy to support, a model patient who gets to be released, a hardworking employee who goes above and beyond to prove that she is deserving of her credentials and pay. I think about how we tread lightly around ghosts.

When we speak of disability activism we often look admiringly to protests, ground-breaking research, collective art practices, and initiatives effecting policy change (see for example Kim, 2014; Shortwell, 2016; Taylor, 2004). What about the obscure, hidden stories of feminized, racialized, colonized and peoples who tread lightly everyday in resistance, who insist on surviving in a world that devalues their lives (Shildrick 1997)? How do we tell these stories in ways that are respectful and just (Talebi, 2016), to ensure that they are held dear in memory, to be part of our collective practice of unforgetting, to become knowledge for those who come after us (Shotwell, 2016)?

Widespread flourishing.

We draw threads from those who come before to continually regenerate upon a blasted landscape. Perhaps this is one way of telling the stories of our kin, through our own embodiment of how they support and sustain us. I draw from the memory of my grandmother’s survival, resistance, and tenaciousness in crafting a path of resistance against the subjugation and devaluation of women. Yet we are never fully autonomous in deciding where we lay roots, where our paths begin and where they end. I trace the ink marks that are already on the pages with stitches and cut lines. I imagine the diverse, unruly growths and flourishing that can take form at the edges of domestication and devastation (Tsing, 2012). I wonder about how we can collectively craft future worlds that are more hospitable to our “messy, complex, hopeful lives” (Shotwell, 2016, p. 163). I reattach the pages in an accordion spread so that the paper and threads collectively hold each other up, rather than being solely reliant on the spine. While we are never fully outside of the frame of power and domination, I continue to contemplate ways to “converse with the ghosts, while remaining committed to life” (Talebi, 2016, p. 109).

• Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Butler, J. (1993). Critically queer. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1(1), p. 17-32.
• Chapman, C. (2013). Cultivating a troubled consciousness: Compulsory sound-mindedness and complicity in oppression. Health, Culture and Society, 5(1), 182-198.
• Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
• Kim, E. (2014). The specter of vulnerability and disabled bodies in protest. In M. Gill & C. J. Schlund-Vials (Eds.), Disability, human rights, and the limits of humanitarianism (pp. 137-154). London: Routledge.
• Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. London: Routledge.
• Shotwell, A. (2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Talebi, S. (2016). Singing without words in an Iranian prison camp. In M. J. Casper & E. Wertheimer (Eds.)., Critical trauma studies: Understanding violence, conflict, and memory in everyday life (pp. 101-110). New York: New York University Press.
• Taylor, S. (2004, March 1). The right not to work: Power and disability. Monthly Review. Retrieved from https://monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/the-right-not-to-work-power-and-disability/
• Tsing, A. (2012). Unruly edges: Mushrooms as companion species, for Donna Haraway. Environmental Humanities 1, 141-154.

Patricia Ki RSW, RCAT, PhD Cand.
@genuine.philosoraptor

An Unfolding Revolution toward Widespread Flourishing. Patricia.