The Whole World in Our Hands is an invitation to break apart, remodel, and act out new grammars of empathy and togetherness. Composed of public artworks, experiential workshops, and a film made by, for, and with disabled artists and collaborators, this program asks: how does the presence of blindness, deafness, illness, and neurodiversity nurture a language that is sensed rather than spoken? What are the syntaxes of touch, smell, sound, and movement? With the understanding that everyone plays a role in how disability is experienced, The Whole World in Our Hands embraces our shared responsibility for making livable worlds for all.

In the poem, “what is in the hand carries what is in the head,” Deaf poet Meg Day incorporates idioms to amplify American Sign Language and its speakers: “the whole world is in our hands / handfuls of it / we are a handful / hand to mouth.”11Meg Day, We Can’t Read This (Virginia: Gazing Grain Press, 2013), 14. Quoted in Declan Gould, “Disability Aesthetics and Poetic Practice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, ed. Timothy Yu. (Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 108. By subverting harmful colloquial phrases and rescripting the well-known spiritual song, Day resists the ableism and audism that permeates language, placing emphasis on the first-person plural “our.”22As opposed to “his” in the traditional African American spiritual, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” (1927). This song became a message of hope during the civil rights movement when Marian Anderson sang it at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. This program borrows its title from Day’s poem, similarly centring collective experiences of disability and their tactile vernaculars that tear able-bodied and neurotypical norms into pieces. Exploring the corporeal possibilities of communication, The Whole World in Our Hands considers the voice as elastic, textured, and embodied—a muscle that can reach beyond the verbal and audible to reconceive what it means to listen and to be heard.

The Whole World in Our Hands extends across six public sites at UTM, including four outdoor lightboxes, a forest clearing, and a screen at the entrance to the campus Meeting Place (Davis Building), as well as through an open research forum, film screening, and guide for sensorial engagement:

Enlarged, restaged, or reimagined, images from four videos are presented in the Blackwood’s lightboxes. Reconfiguring dictions for performance and collaboration based in the sensory, each work is a meditation on the body at the helms of chronic illness, mental health, hearing loss, and the disability rights movement, respectively. Living with psoriatic arthritis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Abi Palmer draws on her homebound methods to bring the weather indoors in Rain. the vacuum cleaner and collaborators’ assemblage from For They Let In The Light combines documentation of a dance by therapists at a mental health facility, with a poem by young artist and inpatient Nemo, to reflect on the ways mental illness turns worlds upside down. In exploring the synesthetic qualities of perception, Darrin Martin considers sound's tactility and spatiality in Take Breath is Breath (Breathe). In Old Long Stay, Yuki Iiyama centres a class action lawsuit against restrictive disability pension laws in Japan, featuring moulded figurines that advocate for Deaf community members who are politically disempowered and cannot for themselves.

Martin’s Steel Tongue Accordion Ears is the second work to animate The Clearing, a site conceived for the Blackwood’s presentation of sound works in a central forested area on UTM.33The name for this site is inspired by JJJJJerome Ellis’ book and album The Clearing (2021), which recalls his experience of stuttering: “it can feel to me like a clearing in a forest, a place where there is an opening and a sense of possibility and unknowing,” https://www.thestammeringcollective.org/contributor/jjjjjerome-ellis. Joining sound fragments from the built and natural world, this work explores the space between melodic harmony and percussive disruption, as well as the inseparability of soundscape and landscape. As a person with congenital and operational hearing loss and tinnitus, Martin’s work addresses the sensorial interdependencies that arise from non-normative ways of hearing.

A site-specific version of Mikhail Karikis’ video installation, I Hear You, was created for the Blackwood’s screen in the Meeting Place vestibule. This single-channel rendition with audio captioning brings the intimate relationships between caregivers and non-verbal individuals into the public realm. In doing so, Karikis confronts the neurotypical gaze, embracing neurodiversity as a model for inclusive connection and exchange.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 9:45am-4pm
Deerfield Rehearsal Halls and Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga

Eliza Chandler, Shay Erlich, Maryam Hafizirad, Devon Healey, Nina Leo, Ely Lyonblum, Moez Surani

Centring the sensing body, this open research forum includes four workshops and a response, which confront barriers to access shaping exclusionary systems, environments, and interactions.

Thursday, December 5, 2024, 7-9pm
CAMH Auditorium, CAMH McCain Centre for Complex Care and Recovery, 1025 Queen Street West, Toronto

Screening of The Tuba Thieves with post-screening conversation with Alison O’Daniel and Darrin Martin

Framed by an inexplicable series of tuba thefts from Los Angeles schools in the early 2010s, d/Deaf artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel’s debut feature film uses the instrument’s absence to explore what it means to listen.

Created by partially blind artist Olivia Brouwer, this guide shares prompts to activate your senses in response to the artworks. It integrates additional tools for Blind and low-vision visitors, including a co-language of Braille and large print. All exhibition sites are mapped on a tactile map and BlindSquare, a GPS-app developed for Blind, DeafBlind, and low-vision individuals.

Join Olivia Brouwer on October 30th (2-3pm) for a guided tour of the exhibition that animates her Sensory Engagement Guide and map. While all are welcome, the tour is designed for Blind and low-vision attendees. Register on Eventbrite.