Desire Path
[Banner is a lichen sculpture floating in the sky]
Recording of Virtual Launch Event.
The Desire Path Virtual Launch Event went live on Friday, February 18th, 2022 with a presentation of the Flower Arrangements. The live-streamed video is below.
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About.
A desire path is made by crossing an unofficial path over and over again.
The Curiosity Paradox started the Desire Path Project in 2021 in conversation with multiple Disabled and non-Disabled leaders in Portland, Oregon who we consider to be access artists. These conversations turned into Flower Arrangements and helped us create the Question Access text.
Access Art.
Access Art describes the ways marginalized people and communities creatively grow resources, design accessibility, celebrate joy and resistance, out-maneuver supremacy culture, and dream worlds beyond the impossible.
This definition is offered to help those of us who make access in creative ways recognize how our practices overlap and differ from each other. It is influenced by artists, activists, and political movements, including the Disability Justice Movement, Open Access, #AccessIsLove, Pleasure Activism, and more.
Who We Are.
The Curiosity Paradox emerges from more than the bodies of its instigators, Grant Miller and Jonathan Paradox Lee. We proudly follow the legacy of radical Disabled-led expertise which suggests that we are the best designers of our liberation, and Disabled living has worth and beauty.
At the Curiosity Paradox, we consider the seemingly benign aspects of gathering people together and reframe them as a fertile ground of solidarity, resistance, learning, and creativity.
Systemic oppression is often hiding. Power imbalances are baked into everyday decision processes like meeting agendas, work schedules, and event registrations.
We work with our audiences and clients to slow down, expose power dynamics, and experiment with power redistribution.
Through consulting, virtual and hybrid events, and interactive artworks that center and model Disability access, we support essential and embodied changes in the ways groups of people make everyday decisions.
Land.
Who was displaced for this project to exist? What was here before? Where are those people now? Which laws were used to claim ownership of this space? Whose labor developed the economy of this place? How does this project pay reparation and return land? How do the funders of this project pay reparation and return land?
SquareSpace, which hosts this website, is headquartered on the traditional lands of the Lanape people, colonially known as the island of Manhattan in New York, NY. We do not know the locations of the server warehouses where this site is held.
Since our activities are shared digitally, please consider the legacy of colonization embedded within technological structures, including the equipment and high speed internet which is not available in many indigenous and marginalized communities.
The Curiosity Paradox benefits as uninvited settlers on the stolen and unceded territory of the Multnomah and Clackamas bands of Chinook and Tualatin-Kalapuya people as well as other bands, unnamed. Colonially referred to as Portland, OR. SquareSpace also has an office in a recently-renovated old bank in SW Portland. This land was notably developed by exploited Chinese immigrants. And this country’s economy was built by millions of stolen Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
We recognize the living leadership of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. We honor the lives of all who endured, and continue to endure in the face of settler-colonialism and white supremacy, and enable us to create a more livable planet. We support movements for reparation and land back.
Funding.
The launch event for this project in 2022 was funded by The City of Portland's Office of Community and Civic Life Disability Program’s Disability Leadership Sponsorship, Regional Arts and Culture Council, and The Emily Georges Gottfried Fund of Oregon Jewish Community Foundation.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the City of Portland. (Regardless of how clever, accurate, or outlandish they may be.)
Special Thanks.
We offer special thanks to all of our Conversation Contributors, Calling Up Justice, Touk Keo, the Justice Producer’s Collaborative, Carmen Papalia, the Decays, our beloved garden Lenore Evermore, and the creek behind Portland Community College Sylvania Campus located near 45.435134, -122.731987, as well as the deer, coyote, owls, and other life living nearby.