This Is Where We Are - JOSEPH GRIGELY

Accessibility can be read first and foremost in the very architecture of a place. Are there steps before the landing that would make entry impossible for people who use wheelchairs? Must one take a circuitous, less visible route to reach the space? How many more elevators or lifting platforms will need to be summoned than for able-bodied visitors in order to go down, up, move around, and access an art center’s exhibitions?

Invited by the Palais de Tokyo to make a gesture in one of its spaces that is notably inaccessible to people with reduced mobility, Joseph Grigely addresses the questions of disability and accessibility that arise there. How might the site’s architecture be adjusted? What would the meeting of a staircase and a ramp look like? How can access for everyone become a shared responsibility, rather than solely that of those labeled “disabled”?

Through a body of works and a risograph publication, the artist sets out to conceive what he calls an “access prosthesis.” With this conceptual and material tool, he proposes to test his own movement through the world as a deaf person, while sketching out ways to make that route more accessible and meaningful. At the same time, this process requires a profound rethinking of how institutions organize, present, and fund accessibility—a project the artist asks us to recognize as exacting for all parties involved. Inaccessibility is not merely an oversight: it is often the result of imperfect historical design, whose effects endure even when intentions to improve are sincere. Hence the title of Grigely’s installation: “This is where we are.”

For more than thirty years, Joseph Grigely’s work—as artist, researcher, and activist—has sought to reconfigure the way the disabled body is perceived, to present it as a body of capacities: a body that questions. Who has access to what? Who is denied access to places, to people, to exchanges? And how does this affect us collectively?

Although he has explored many media, Grigely is best known for his Conversation Pieces—a series of works composed of sheets on which hearing people wrote to communicate with him. These notes, rearranged, become fragmented narratives at the intersection of orality and writing. Sometimes arranged in formal grids, sometimes in freer tableaux, they make visible the access to others’ voices while becoming the material of the work itself.

Thus, for three decades, Joseph Grigely has explored the idea of an art in which accessibility is conceived as a medium in its own right. “This is where we are” stands as a culmination of that inquiry.