Everyday Experience: Accessibility and Aesthetics In Our Shared City

A city is not experienced the same way by everyone. We move through it with
diverse abilities and disabilities, which can shift from one space to another, from one
moment to the next – whether those differences are embodied, situational, shaped
by the environment, or all of the above. These experiences are often dismissed,
internalised, or compartmentalised so that those who experience them can continue
navigating daily life.

Within our shared city, what we need instead is to highlight these differences and
confront how individuals with varying abilities and disabilities experience the city.
Through a public talk, the event explores how three individuals with different
disabilities navigate the city – how they move through it, perceive it, experience it,
and interact with it, as well as how the city shapes them and how they, in turn,
reshape it.

The event is presented in connection with Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which
is marked annually on May 21.

Please sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetk6KuaF7wj6NlTKacHrNL-BtZicDx9QcgOe0TwYyR_LUPqg/viewform?usp=publish-editor

The talks will focus on people’s experiences of the city, as well as other aspects of
their everyday lives that they choose to highlight and discuss with you – the
audience – and how these affect them. They will also explore what works and what
does not within our city, and how its aesthetics can include and/or exclude its
citizens.

Two of the speakers have each published an article on the AND ORS online
platform, which they will revisit during the event in discussion with the audience. If
you’re curious, you can read the articles in advance:

Cold, Sterile, Sleek - Orderly Ableism – by Anthony Dexter Giannelli
https://and-ors.com/articles/cold-sterile-sleek-orderly-ableism

The Unfulfilled Promise of Belonging: Aesthetic Accessibility – by Cathrine Mejdal
https://and-ors.com/articles/the-unfulfilled-promise-of-belonging-aesthetic-accessibility

Cath Borch Jensen’s article will be published on May 14, one week before the talk,
so stay tuned: https://and-ors.com/

The project brings attention to accessibility and to inclusive, diverse urban
development, using the city as a platform for dialogue, learning, and participation.

Meet the speakers:

Anthony Dexter Giannelli is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. His practice
explores the tension between the physical and the virtual, questioning how we, as
immaterial beings, interact with the world when the physicality of our bodies is
limited. Through his work, he examines how the built environment can embed
exclusion, and how aesthetics can become a vehicle for exclusion rather than
accessibility and belonging. He asks what happens when clean, ordered design
ideals are prioritised over access, warmth, and human difference – and who gets to
belong as a result.

Cathrine Mejdal is an independent accessibility consultant and keynote speaker, and
the founder of Mejdal Consulting. Her practice is dedicated to accessibility, strategic
communication, and project development, where she supports businesses and
cultural institutions in engaging more meaningfully with people with disabilities. She
is profoundly Deaf and a native Danish Sign Language user, bringing lived
experience directly into her work.

Cath Borch Jensen is a cross-media conveyer of #WhatWeDontTalkAbout, a body
activist, accessibility consultant, public speaker and, since 2007, a pioneering
self-taught integrated dancer, contributing to Danish stage, TV, and podcast
productions. She has worked as a conveyer of contemporary art at Copenhagen
Contemporary for several years. Cath’s bodily rooted cross-media practice explores
and challenges our human ways of relating to and communicating with and about
one another.

The event is presented in collaboration between AND ORS, AccessibleEU and KLS
Pureprint and Sharing Copenhagen.

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