Artist and researcher Ren Loren Britton has long been navigating, transforming and unmaking ableist, white-supremacist space, foregrounding anti-racism, Trans* Feminism and disability justice. A recipient of the Nieuwe Instituut’s Research Fellowship, Ren shares hacks, tips and references to use, critique and transform labour practices for disabled people and our accomplices — towards support structures for all of us, everywhere.
This essay is part of our partnership with the Nieuwe Instituut. A series of 10 contributions with 10 former fellows to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Research Fellowship Programme.
"I view accessibility as imagination in practice."
- Imani Barbarin
I am an artist-designer tangling with various lived experiences; which neoliberal diversity politics transforms into identity categories and then places on me. Working in and with cultural work and institutions shapes the conditions of my artistic practice; as such, I have been developing some hacks that support me while we are on the way towards changing everything. Following multiple strands of abolitionist thought, I am trying to work with hacks that do their work towards unmaking the very need for that hack to exist in the first place, because they transform conditions. This is imperfect and contested work; I see all of these practices and tools as starting points.
Following Ewa Majweska (author of Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common, Verso, 2021) I am thinking about how political agency is considered often to be highly heroic, hyper masculine and shaped for ‘men’s work’ — whereas political agency shaped for others might instead be what Majweska terms as ‘weak resistance’. She speaks about ‘weak resistance’ as “the unheroic and common forms of protest and persistence that led to a redefinition of the most general notions of political agency in feminist and minoritarian ways”. In these terms, the hacks that both I and we work with — as trans*feminists working on disability justice — speak to the ways that spaces and relations can be transformed, re-thematising “proper political agency” as formed through the repetition of another way of doing things. In this way, I follow Majweska as well as Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift in Trans Femme Futures, who ‘storytell’ about everyday actions that revolutionise our lives.
I am skeptical of using identity categories to validate what I say, especially as they become taken up with in neoliberal frameworks, this is something I follow Monica Basbous and Zakaria Nasser in. At the same time, I believe that it matters who speaks from where, and with what marked or unmarked perspective (per the work of Max Liborion). The white supremacist mode of naming difference — in which Black, Indigenous and POC scholars are often named as such, whereas white scholars remain un-marked — violently and consistently re-produces whiteness as the norm. As a neurodivergent, disabled, trans*gender, white-passing indigenous person — one who grew up poor and is a migrant — various kinds of diversity politics and identification attempt to place me specifically, in terms of the places or states from/to which I can speak.
This dance between naming sites of difference is important, as markers of situated knowledge (Donna Haraway, Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde) matter. In Germany, where I live and work, projects like ‘Diskriminierungskritische Perspektiven in die Curricula an der Schnittstelle von Bildung und den Künsten’ (Discrimination-critical perspectives in curricula at the interface between education and the arts) attempt to address the historical continuities that inform what curricula is written, therefore informing who feels like they can speak, share, enter into conversation and inform what is eventually rendered as ‘important culture, to which we/one ought to pay attention to’. This happens through syllabus writing, resource sharing, all the way from what students raise as discussion points in the classroom, and into the freelance art world: all of this to determine what topics and discussions may be raised as ‘urgent’, ‘timely’ and ‘important’.
Practices informed by abolitionist disability justice — which is to say anti-racist and trans*feminist justice (as per Trans*Femme Futures) — articulate a politics of solidarity where difference matters. I would venture that the interwoven resistances and connections, matter even more. It matters both who worlds worlds, and who says what; it also matters what complicities we navigate and manoeuvre within. It is about moving with a set of complications, following Moya Bailey, who puts it this way: we do what we need to do to not “let white supremacy relax”. What this looks like in practice can unfold in prismatic directions and for me, this keeps notions of how to identify — why, where and how — open.
"It matters both who worlds worlds, and who says what; it also matters what complicities we navigate and manoeuvre within."
Articulations of difference then shape the context from which I speak. I think of my differences (from the presumed normative baseline of non-disabled cis-white masc as ways of enabling myself to make agentive choices, in terms of how I relate to the historical and ongoing violences in which I too play a part. This is also a project of simultaneously working on becoming attentive to, navigating, caring for, resisting and producing these entanglements otherwise; to refuse the set of conditions issued as default and to choose not perpetuate them, because of the violences they rest upon.
Shifting back to art and institutional contexts, this set of problems informs ways in which I have been tokenised within art spaces; this demonstrates the structural operation of neoliberal diversity politics in the arts. My tokenisation has happened many times, and it will keep happening. Rather than changing infrastructures in the arts such that anti-racism, anti-ableism, decolonial, pro queer and non-extractive practices are centred, vital funding to our institutions are routinely and brutally slashed. This follows capitalist logic: demand growth while finances are cut. Get more, pay less.
What follows is that we who work on “diverse” topics get “slotted in” as per minimum requirements. Justification is made within neoliberal capitalist logics for our work because we — the othered one — fulfill categories of social justice that state logics want to recognise, claiming the benediction that comes with ostensibly “working on” such issues. When they are “working on” disability, does it mean that there is structural transformation away from ableist logics infrastructurally at the institutional level? No. It often means that a disabled artist is brought into a context, tokenised, precariously platformed, semi-supported in their work.
To survive this as disabled artists, if we can, we have several tools — like access riders, community support networks and citation agreements that try to reproduce less harm. At an individual and community scale, these are ‘wedges’ that attempt to hold certain doors open, to create more space for ourselves — while we wonder if and how this can be sustainable. The institution, meanwhile, gets to claim they are “working on disability”, even as they continue to normalise working patterns far beyond the nine-to five (which was never accessible to begin with). Non-disabled communication norms like being available “all the time” are commonplace, as well as ‘simple’ colloquialisms like describing this same work culture as (content warning here for ableism) “crazy” and “insane” — when what is mostly meant is “overwhelming”. Something I have learned alongside and keep bringing gratitude for, the work of Lydia X. Z. Brown.
To work on topics related to embodiment means that this work becomes slotted into check-box logic beloved by funding structures, a kind of “representational justice”, as Luce de Lire speaks about. Disability? Check. Trans*gender? Check. Migrant? Check. Check. Check. Check.
Working in a critical care-centered art and design context means that there is never enough time, money or resources to unmake what has already been there, whereas the primary goal for any neoliberal enterprise is to keep going and grow. What exists already is tough. What exists already is based on ableist white supremacism, even when it is mitigated by actors that resist this… Within all systems I have encountered so far, this framework is default. As an artist-designer then, what to do about this? What tools, methods and practices are there to interrupt paradigms of ableist white supremacy? In my practice, I have been working with a few such tools, which I offer with an invitation for others to borrow and hack them, to negotiate the ambivalence of making worlds possible without burning out, dropping out or getting burned. Devising hacks is the work of changing institutions: they transform situations and infrastructures and at best, they transform both physical and social norms — such that new ways of relation, practice and work can be practiced within the same institutions that threaten to burn us out.
Regularly when I bring up access practices in cultural spaces I hear something about how the cultural norms “are different in this space”, but the bathrooms are still organised via cis-normative norms ie: binary gender and it is perceived as excessive to ask to change it. Then, I hear about the one person before who mentioned something about disabled people and access but nothing changed; they got burnt out and left that space. Our bodies — as dissonant trans* and disabled bodies — produce friction-full encounters in space. Regularly, when I ask for gender neutral bathrooms and low sensory spaces so that I can be more myself, my request is added… to the bottom of the list.
It’s 2025 and i’m a trans*person who is still talking about bathrooms.
It’s 2025 and most of the time it is still not safe for trans*people to go to the bathroom.
The perspective of accessibility with which I work operates beyond notions of accessibility just for disabled people. Everyone has access needs; it is an ableist culture that caters to non-disabled access needs as normative, and subsequently renders other needs not already normalised as “extra”. This is a mechanism of ableist culture.
"Everyone has access needs; it is an ableist culture that caters to non-disabled access needs as normative."
As I repeat in each of my classes and workshops — when you can fully be yourself in a space, that means the space is accessible to you. If you have to make concessions and turn off parts of yourself to be there, it’s likely that whichever space you are in, it is not fully accessible to you. When a space isn’t accessible to you, you feel like the space isn’t for you; it will not support or even permit you to be. In my work, I think about how these feelings shape those who come to understand that they can, sustain, think, play and exist in any space. The way we treat each other and plan for each other in space shapes the kind of access we make with people across class, disability, migration status, language and more. These social and infrastructural norms shape who gets to be in various spaces and how those spaces may become agents of resisting structural ableist white supremacy.
"When a space isn’t accessible to you, you feel like the space isn’t for you; it will not support or even permit you to be."
Forgetting to eat, working beyond exhaustion, normalising partial access, never taking group notes to normalise asynchronous access: all these are practices that come with ignoring our (and others) bodies. They also perpetuate and privilege those in cultural spaces that are the closest to dominant forms of cis- non-disabled whiteness. As long as this persists, there will be a high level of exhaustion and exclusion in terms of who is able to maintain being in art spaces. I need a break because I need it, and you do too. We all need to slow down and think about how behaviours that we are normalising within arts practice actually invite people — and whom they invite. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, there’s one thing we need to change: everything. On the way to changing everything, we have hacks.
"As Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, there’s one thing we need to change: everything. On the way to changing everything, we have hacks."
Hacks on the way towards changing Everything
By hacks, I mean the sense of hacking away from non-disabled norms towards transitional practices — not hacking our bodies to make them fit into (t)his hellscape.
”You don’t need to be fixed, my queens—it’s the world that needs the fixing.”
- Johanna Hedva
“Bodies are not for hacking, Bigotry is.”
- Remi M. Yergeau
Hacking — as with the language of DIY, DIWO (Do It With Others), renovation and building — offers metaphors and practices for the in-between. Tools offer another way of thinking about what is being pushed forward, and how to protect both ourselves and our communities from falling into the same paradigms of extraction, racism, masking and extending beyond our embodied needs that persist. What would a third-space be (per the terminology of la paperson) between myself as an artist interfacing with institutions and also inviting people into my practice, occasionally hosted by institutions. What transitional practices that could operate within this in-between?
Shields
Sometimes you just need to shield someone from something. That someone might be yourself. You might not know the degree of ableism, anti-queer sentiment and racism in a situation — until you do. The shield comes under pressure, wielded only after taking on and withstanding what shouldn’t be sustained. White possessive methods of “get it, research it, curate it” (see Heavy Processing by TL Cowan and Jas Rault) mean that often, curators or institutional workers might have no idea about the terms of your practice; you are curated into a context, with no shield from the assumptions thrown your way by their under-researched perspectives on your work. What then?
To work with shields, someone must agree to become the shield. Likely, this will be an intermediary between the people paying for the work to be done or shown and the invited artists themselves. To be a shield is to take on more communication and to study the terms of the work of the people invited into a context. It is to be present at more of the meetings, in an attempt to reduce harm; putting one’s own thinking towards ways to make the experience better for the guest in the situation. It is also to take up the work of language and writing; to check things before they are forwarded on and to buy lunch; to interview the institutional workers on their position on genocide; to find ways to know when the shield needs to come up and when it can be taken down. It is to think of accessibility plans, presentations, budgets and mediation — including sharing after the event and ahead of time — and to make these plans present in these in conversations with the institutional workers before inviting your guests into the situation. Taking up the shield can only be temporary, and it does invite exhaustion due to the necessity of thinking ahead.
If shielding was taken as an ongoing hack and implemented by many (as it is) other worlds have the possibility of slipping through into institutions and slowly making change. When someone acts as a shield and people are supported in their radical work: the work reaches audiences who need it and those who are doing the work are supported to keep doing it.
Hacks On The Way, Ren Loren Britton, Shields, "Dancing across the image are various drawn graphic illustrations of hands - they make a permeable shield of hands blocking in various directions." © Ren Loren Britton & CC2r.
Wedges: Access Riders
In this mode of tool-building, Access Riders are reconsidered as wedges — wedges to hold the door open to create more space. Wedges can be temporal and they can split contexts open in two - like I unfolded in my collaboration as MELT with Iz Paehr: Rituals Against Barriers. Access Riders are documents that speak about access needs, often along lines of disability, trans*queer, migrant, class and language experiences. They are documents that attempt to make collaboration possible and joyful. They open discussions about how to make events, exhibitions and collaborations anti-racist and accessible to disabled & trans* community from the beginning of a collaboration, not as a ‘quick fix’ at the end. They reduce labour for those people invited into a context because at best, they name what would be needed to transform situations to work better for the invited guests, and detail what would allow them to be fully present without getting burnt out.
Access riders are regularly sent at the beginning of a collaboration, with various needs laid out for how to create access across differences. They hold space for issues to be named and to be either addressed or plainly un-resolvable and un-ignorable in public; this demonstrates what Sara Hendren describes, when like when designed artefacts point to problems and raise awareness. This kind of pointing towards and negotiating the problem, is something I have explored in my previous article, ‘On Rehearsing Access’. Access riders can be about inserting various realities into one another and not resolving them, while simultaneously calling attention to discrepancies and then wondering, “well, okay: what to do from here?” Or they can literally be about meeting access needs as they are laid out and making the space actually accessible for those who are there.
They can also be about allowing those things to then transform the context. In my own access rider, I say that “at the time of publishing about any event, this event’s access information must also be made accessible — this includes but is not limited to: sign language Interpretation, access copies, information on child care and stipends available that make it possible to join the event, gender neutral bathrooms, wheelchair access and wheelchair accessible bathrooms, distance to the closest public transport, information on low scent and low sensory spaces and information on discounted or free tickets to lessen class-based exclusion.” This model can then be included every time any event information is published for all institutions in the future. The rider, therefore, would produce a wedge which could change things for now, and in an ongoing way.
If the needs and requests articulated in access riders were taken up by institutions and maintained — so that the things that have been requested by community members and invited guests could stay in place — then over time, the norms of a site/institution/place would change because different priorities and values would come to the fore, shifting who feels like they could be in any space.
Hacks On The Way, Ren Loren Britton, Wedges, “The text 'The Wedge That Splits Can Also Hold Open' is drawn in a graphic hand drawn cursive lettering - it references Ree Morton’s work 'The Plant that Heals May Also Poison’." © Ren Loren Britton & CC2r.
Support Structures: Infrastructure Acknowledgement (Support Structure)
I have been and continue to be transformed by the work of Constant, a Brussels based trans*- & anti-racist feminist institution that cares about copyleft, free/libre + Open Source Softwares and developing critiques of these same practices. In their work, they note that “Constant works with feminist servers, situated publishing, active archives, ex-titutional networks, (re)learning situations, hackable devices, performative protocols, solidary infrastructures and other spongy practices to stake out paths towards speculative, libre, intersectional technologies."
Thinking about support structures, I have been developing infrastructure acknowledgements. Infrastructure acknowledgements are a hack that names who, how and what is supporting the digital infrastructure that enables this online meeting, this collective digital note-taking session, the producing of a coded artefact. It’s a practice that thinks with citational politics and one that moves with digital discomfort – not all feminist servers are online all the time, nor can they be. The hidden politics, and indeed hidden curriculum (per Annette Krauss) behind — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Netflix, and Alphabet — tools and technologies follow settler colonial and ableist white supremacist logics without interruption. A current letter from ‘No AI for Atrocity Crimes’ speaks about the ways that advanced technologies, including but not limited to AI-operated, near-automated attacks and bombings of densely populated civilian areas in Gaza. These actions are supported by the infrastructures of technological ‘Big Tech’ giants including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Cisco and Oracle (to name a few). This digital technical infrastructure is the same reality which is platforming a lot of the critical thoughts typed into computers on Google Docs, spoken about on Microsoft Teams and delivered to our doors by Amazon. What about speaking out and naming infrastructures with other politics at the heart?
Regularly when presenting, I name Constant as a way of speaking about the material infrastructure and web of relations through which I am implicated, through my personal network and computing infrastructure that informs my network. The pads that I work on with collaborators are hosted on Constant’s servers, in their space and not on a big-tech server. Pads are online notepads which are accessible via a URL link with a specific ending and can be simultaneously edited by many people. Constant’s Ether Pads offer a host of colours for authors and are stored on a server with Constant’s care in Brussels. I know the people who care for our collective notes and thoughts, who follow feminist server principles, proposing a feminist server that is… “run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist” and “is autonomous in the sense that she tries to decide for her own dependencies.” Naming, articulating and platforming what infrastructure is implicated within relationships is another hack, a support structure for my (and our) work, one that we can lean on and with which to build — with our interests at heart.
If we move in full acknowledgement of the infrastructures that we are engaging in our day-to-day work, an awareness of the interwoven contexts between seemingly innocuous Big Tech that furthers war-machine production would, over time, be further questioned. We can collectively disinvest from technologies that harm, and invest in technologies that further networks of community and collective support we wish for — this is the long term perspective that Infrastructure Acknowledgements moves towards.
Hacks On The Way, Ren Loren Britton, Infrastructure Acknowledgement, “In gatherings, loops and dangles a permeable drawn graphic chain of connections moves across the image." © Ren Loren Britton & CC2r.
Bio
Ren Loren Britton is a trans*disciplinary artist-designer who reverberates with trans*feminism, technosciences, radical pedagogy and disability justice. Their practice engages trans*ness by following trans politics and by crossing contexts with feminisms. They attend to hir- his- her- stories and presents of social and technical infrastructures that make lives accessible and pleasurable. Ren has shared artistic work within multiple institutions including ALT_CPH Biennale, Constant, Sonic Acts, Yale University, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Utopia Kiosk and Het Nieuwe Institute among others. Recent academic articles have been published in Catalyst, MATTER and within various edited volumes. During Autumn 2025, Ren will be in residence at PACT Zollverein and a Guest Professor of Communication and Information Design at Burg Halle.
