7 October 2023 17:30 – 18:30
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270
8005 Zurich
Carmen Papalia, Blind Field Shuttle, 2012, non-visual walking tour, photo: Jordan Reznick. Courtesy the artist.
[Image description: Carmen Papalia leading a walking tour with his cane, guiding people across the street while a security guard observes them. Forming a line behind the artist, participants have their eyes closed and link their arm to the person in front of them.]
Blind Field Shuttle is a non-visual walking tour in which participants line up behind the artist, link arms, and agree to shut their eyes for a roughly hour-long walk. Carmen Papalia describes the experience as an opportunity for the participant to unlearn visual primacy and use their non-visual senses as a way of knowing the world. The project grew out of the artist’s choice to describe himself as a “non-visual learner” and exists as one in a series of related works that highlights the unseen bodies of knowledge in non-visual spaces.
Carmen Papalia is a non-visual social practice artist with chronic and episodic pain. He uses organizing strategies and improvisation to address his access to public spaces, art institutions and visual culture. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is a response to the harms of the Medical Model of Disability. Papalia has exhibited and performed internationally at venues such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Liverpool, and the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity.
Prior to the performance, an artist talk will take place at 16:00 at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst.
The performance is co-organized by the research group "Rethinking Art History through Disability" and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst as part of the exhibition Interdependencies: Perspectives on Care and Resilience.
To register for the event, write an email to kunstvermittlung@mgb.ch The walking tour will start at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Please wear comfortable walking shoes. Email info@migrosmuseum.ch for any access requirements.