Public Disability History

by Ylva Söderfeldt “Disabilities? I don’t have any!” This is my mother making a joke when I asked her if I could interview her for the blog. She’s visiting from Sweden to hang out with her grandkids (and me), something she does often as she’s mostly retired from her work as a neurologist. My mother is a professor of neurology, holds an M.D. and a Ph. D., and still practices medicine sometimes. She has four children and seven grandchildren. Born in 1946, she belongs to the post-war generation and although she was quite busy raising children and building a career, she has also been a life-long activist. She is also hearing impaired since birth and now has a cochlear implant. I’m her youngest child, now a historian, and have focused on Deaf history for most of my career, a topic I got acquainted with through her. I wanted to talk with her about the many ways in which disability figures in our lives. The thought I had was to have a conversation with you about disability from different

By Martin Nachbar , choreographer Translated by Ylva Söderfeldt On December 7, 2016 my team (consisting of dancers Lisa Densem, Sunniva Vikor Egenes, and Benni Pohlig, the lighting designer Bruno Pocheron, costume designer Marion Montel, and the producer Susanne Beyer) and I celebrated the premiere of a dance performance that approaches the subject matter ‘cyborgs’. “This thing I am” is my latest production and will be performed again in a modified version on June 17 and 18 in the Sophiensaelen in Berlin. Because our budget didn’t allow us to actually work on the interface between bodies and technology, I instead focused on two aspects that are technological and fantastic even though they don’t involve proper cyborg technology: First, we worked with the fact that we as humans have always used different techniques in order to be in the world and survive day by day. Through practice and repetition, numerous of these so-called body techniques are stored within our bodies, allowing