We Are Studios | Meeting Ourselves Across Time

This panel explores a rare opportunity for Deaf and Disabled people to encounter their own history as culture, not just record. Powerhouse describes its museum as looking both backward and forward, and for Disabled communities this duality carries particular weight, often present in archives and objects, but rarely recognised as cultural authors of their own story. The panel reframes this as a question of inheritance. Disability culture is often discovered sideways, through other Disabled people, art and objects, rather than passed down conventionally.

Three voices anchor the conversation. Ebony Wightman (We Are Studios), an autistic Disabled artist and cultural worker, speaks to the research behind the collaboration with Powerhouse and the broader case for understanding Disability as culture. Grazia Napoletano, a polio survivor and early contributor to the project’s oral history research, brings lived testimony connecting institutionalisation, migration, Disabled labour and erasure. Fayen d’Evie contributes perspectives on eugenics, erasure and the responsibilities museums face as genetic testing, gene editing and AI reshape ideas about which bodies and minds are valued.

This is an Auslan interpreted event.