Coalition Constellation: Constellating Reparations

Coalition Constellation: Constellating Reparations is a multisensory installation following nonlinear stories about affirmative, collaborative practices of social justice. The stories consist of past and contemporary examples of collective self-empowerment that have led to success over time as a result of sustainable coalitions between Disabled people, trans people, those affected by racism, and other oppressed groups. This work is part of the larger research project, Coalition Storytelling*, and is directed against forms of passivity and negativity in our present society and moves toward a ‘we’ that is multiple, complex, maintaining a multitude of goals, practices, collectives, and oppositions, while still making political change possible. This ongoing research collects stories of when things went well for and between oppressed groups—especially when living conditions were previously dire—towards developing collaborative storytelling practices aiming to uplift and empower our collective coalitional political imaginaries.

In the three channel video installation a story is told that tangles with the ambivilances of what it is to gain political recognition and gain reparations, and how these reparations ultimately do not repair. Starting with Udo Sierck — one of the main organizers of Krüppelzeitung (Crip Magazine). From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, the Bremen-based magazine published and discussed the everyday lives and resistance of Disabled people. The work follows a story of coalition between Disabled, Gay, Roma, Sinti and Jewish survivors and family members of the Holocaust and suggests that coalitional work in the face of ableist white supremacy is always meaningful between communities — the work further considers the problems that follow from working within structures that were never meant to protect those on the margins in the first place.

Narratives presented within the video take up the power that comes from trans*feminist practices of renaming structures. Considering what would be different if instead when we looked to the sky in the West - we thought of stories not of a jealous Zeus but rather a story of a group of people with all their differences, coming together and fighting to unmake white supremacy. From this point the work re-names constellations from this starting point.

The installation works with the aesthetics of access, using subtitles (EN + DE), audio descriptions (EN + DE), and access copies — formats that center disabled, non-normative, and neurodivergent modes of perception. In the center of the installation, there is a dreaming table sculpture which projectors rest on. And on the other side of the room, a tactile star map allows visitors to feel the night sky above Innsbruck during the exhibition period, and to annotate one’s own community constellations.