Kazimir Bielecki from Enfield arts group Dyspla introduces its latest local project

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

Whether now or in time to come, whether you were born or develop a disability, you will be disabled. Perception and fear guides these statements, with one all too often overruling the other, resulting in an erasure of difference, the aesthetics of disability.

If you feel disabled by society and live in Enfield, please consider joining our free art workshops. We are Dyspla, an award-winning, disabled-led, Enfield-based arts studio, and we have been awarded an artistic residency with Arbeit Studios, supported by Enfield Council, exploring our disabled community.

Only to be seen smiling, in tasteful complexion, our irregular voices are all too often silenced and we believe there are more of us out there than statistics tell. Found in the precarity of identity exposure, in a world where disability is demonised, if you are disabled by society and want to share your story, we want to hear from you. We will collaborate to build a collection of artworks about life as disabled people in Enfield for exhibition in August.

We have been continually supported by Arts Council England to create our important work for eleven years, and long may it continue, but we have become recently aware that our disabled art is disturbing the status quo. In the last two years our artworks have been ‘removed’ (torn down in one case) from three British institutions due to the disability aesthetics residing 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’ organisations purporting to support marginalised communities. When faced with artwork which challenged the orthodoxy, it was eradicated from view.

The story of ‘erasure’ is one all too often experienced within all of our lives. It happens in many contexts, from politics to education; uncomfortable views, dialectic or visual, are the ones that become silenced and ghosted to avoid controversy. Dissenting rhetoric made to apologise 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 right and wrong. The beautifully triumphant create a new world in their own image, the unsightly outsider is pushed to the back of the stage and cast out.
Although all of us will at one point in our lives become disabled, the story of disability in Enfield is one rarely told and too often shunned. Enfield is Disabled will share the narrative of the unheard, the unseen.

Get in touch with Dyspla:
Call 07917157748
Visit dyspla.com/disabled

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