CIB25 Focus: Dis_ability
Our focus topic this year is Dis_ability.
On May 3 and 4, the main festival will take place, and the satellite week begins one week earlier. All events are free and open to everyone! Below you can find the events related to our focus topic.
This time, we as a team decided to focus on a socio-political issue instead of a country.
Dis_abled people exist in all social classes, in all regions and in all age groups. Nevertheless, they are rarely considered, taken into account or even included. Instead, they encounter obstacles and barriers everywhere – including in the culture scene. Social and cultural participation is not only a human right, but also a basic prerequisite for social and democratic cohesion and mutual solidarity.
That is why this year we want to focus on comics that deal with the topic of dis_ability. The dis_abled community's demand is: Nothing about us without us!
We will present more perspectives from neurodiverse or dis_abled artists to a wider public during the Satellite Week and the main festival program. In addition to the already established sign language interpreters on stage, there will be a designated quiet area during the festival weekend. Various workshops, stage discussions and readings on the topic are planned for the Satellite Week and the main festival. To this end, we are also trying to make our events and locations accessible, to remove barriers and to enable participation. We know that this will never be perfect. But it can be better.
Our founding motto remains: Comics for EVERYONE and for free!
“Mirror, mirror, on the page”: Chronicling Inner and ‘Other’ worlds in comics
All events on the main stage will be translated live into sign language.
Our focus topic podcast.
On May 3rd and 4th, the main festival will take place at the Museum for Communication Berlin.
Why do we use dis_ability?
We have adopted the spelling of dis_ability with an underscore from activists. The underscore is intended to show on a linguistic level that disability is a construct, and to encourage us to question how we understand disability: is a person dis_abled, or rather are they dis_abled by external factors? In German, the underscore highlights the “obstacle” (Hindernis) in “disability” (Behinderung) to focus on the obstacles or barriers that need to be recognised and removed so that social participation can be made possible for everyone. The English term dis_ability also points to this fact: every person who is “disabled” is also “abled” – and vice versa. There are many other ways to make dis_ability visible linguistically. When in doubt, always listen, ask questions, and never tire of discussing and philosophising about terms.
