“Disability is not limited to the phenomena occurring in the body; disability is political.” This is how Berenice Olmedo positions herself, an “able-bodied human,” when asked by Jane Ursula Harris for the 2022 Flash article “Berenice Olmedo: The Myth of Autonomy.” Olmedo is an artist, researcher, and storyteller whose practice questions the structures of normality, ableism, class, and objectification as impositions of power and hierarchy. Her work centers on disability, differences, and otherness as a method of giving visibility to those on society’s margins and confronting crip erasure. Through publications, sculptures, kinetic objects, and installations, she explores disability as anthropogenesis, the political and societal structures of homogeneity, and the inequities of biopolitics. Her works boldly highlight societal fears and aversions to differences, investigating the use of technology to mediate the body.
As a volunteer for CRIT (Children’s Rehabilitation Institute TeletonUSA), a center for children with neuromuscular disabilities, the artist is attuned to the experiences, knowledge, and perspectives of people with disabilities. Utilizing medical-grade materials, orthotics, and prosthetics that she either collects from the receptacles of orthopedic workshops or buys from a flea market in the Mexico City neighborhood of Iztapalapa, Olmedo transforms them from utilitarian objects into sculptures. In doing so, she enacts storytelling as a method of activism, which the queer, Mad, femme of color scholar Dr. Shayda Kafai described in Crip Kinship as hard-to-swallow stories and activist acts for remembrance. The sense of remembrance and commemoration is most notable in some of the titles of Olmedo’s work, especially in the Anthroprosthetic series (2018), in which the prosthetic artifacts and accessories such as ballet shoes are given personal names after the pediatric patients who wore them. Therefore, she honors crip bodies and expands notions of an existence of sustainability that cannot subsist in a capitalist structure of productivity or usefulness.
In many of her interviews and writings, Olmedo asserts that “the human is entirely prosthetic” and encourages viewers to question how to embody and think in a non-normative existence. For her Eccéite exhibition in 2022, Olmedo wrote that the non-normative existence, also understood as a crip existence, “creates possibilities that allow [human beings] to think about themselves more as living beings rather than human beings.” Thus, if we can shift our thinking as living beings along with a crip existence, we can envision radical ways of being that thrive and survive out of capitalist structures of normalcy and ableism.
