In the current political climate, neither your average plutocrat nor cultural administrator is ready to tolerate the “autonomy” of cultural and educational institutions, whether in the vein of pluralism or partisanship, even when a genocide is unfolding before our eyes. (And forget about enjoining historical and geopolitical context.) This makes it ever more clear that autonomy’s philosophical aesthetics should be approached in a spirit of genealogical-critical inquiry but also contested—not just discursively, as it has been for years, but also practically.

In ORTA’s Spectacular Experiments, which are always site-specific, mise-en-scène arises from the unpredictable monologues, sounds, and movements of a wide variety of people on the one hand, and equally surprising, mobile, sometimes exceptionally large-scale trash compositions on the other. One can always sense the endless, un-appropriable movement of thought and matter fluxes that carry, permeate, and reassemble all the moments of the performance, plunging it into a zone of indistinguishability between the imaginary and the real.

Even within this range of action, liberation and individual rights have been the cornerstones of disability activism from the 1970s onwards, and the academic discipline of disability studies that followed close behind. In the 2000s, however, thinkers such as Robert McRuer and Eli Clare took a more transgressive approach, reappropriating the figure of the “crip” or the “freak,” defying normative categories with a middle finger raised. In refusing assimilation to—or “accessible” amendments of—the status quo, the crip is revolutionary, avant-garde even. The crip wants a total reconfiguration of norms, not just ramps and closed captions.