a songspell for our resonant bodies + crip ecologies was crafted and cast by alexa dexa and Disabled community members as part of the Crip’d Ecologies: Unfurling Expanded Environments Convening, both at Root Division and online over Zoom, on March 10th, 2024.

Together, we explored sound-making as a continual collaboration with ourselves, each other, other species, the Earth, the cosmos, our crip ecologies, and all that is and was and will be. Approaching our crip experiences as a symphony unfolding with our mobility aids, bedscapes, companions, environments, and our crip understandings of the world, we crafted + cast a songspell contextualizing our Disabled day to day as valuable, gorgeous sound worlds, ours to shape and be shaped by.

Sounds include pills rattling in pill boxes, salve containers opening and closing, no-touch thermometers beeping, screen readers reading text aloud, pillows with air whooshing out of them as they are leaned into, towels rubbing against faces, sucking candies jiggling about in a jar, and folks breathing, making bird calls, gargling water, speaking, rubbing their hands together or against things, singing, humming, and laughing.

Co-curated by moira williams and Jeremiah Barber, Crip’d Ecologies centers disabled artists across race, gender, class and disability, who are expanding ideas of environmentalism toward a more complex reflection of our feelings of trauma, fear, anger and desire. Crip strategies are dynamic, interdependent, and brilliant. These strategies are expressed throughout the exhibition and Convening, offering new perspectives on landscapes that are personal, shared, participatory, hacked, and imagined. Each of these relational ways of being and thinking include our body-mind-spirits. The works here break away from colonial ableisms of the land and our bodies. They challenge where the idea of “invasive” species comes from, and find joy and ancestral connections by treating the entirety of our surroundings as part of our nature. Multispecies relationships abound, and are echoed in Crip queer and tactile ecologies, imprinting on leaves, bodies filled with flowering branches, memory, sacredness, sorrow, and abundantly colorful depictions of plants, animals and the atmosphere and planets. The environment, increasingly synonymous with “the built world”, is playfully and spaciously reimagined and challenged throughout the exhibition to unfurl Crip’d ecological intimacies.