A powerful, award-winning installation by a disabled film-maker has yet to find a London venue willing to display it, despite being shown at two of America’s most renowned cultural institutions.
Liz Crow’s Resistance: which way the future?, which explores the horrors of the targeted killing of disabled people in Nazi Germany, has just finished successful exhibitions at the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Although it has been exhibited at several UK venues, it has still not been seen in London, where Crow is seeking venues with a similar high profile to the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian.
She is also hoping that a London venue will show the installation as part of the cultural festival that will take place in the lead-up to the London Olympics and Paralympics in 2012.
Crow said: “It does fit in with 2012. I think it’s a very hopeful piece even though it’s linked to the Holocaust.
“It’s about international harmony and diversity and people working together, and how you start achieving those things. It fits the ethos of the Paralympics.”
The Aktion-T4 programme is believed to have led to the targeted killing of as many as 200,000 disabled people, and possibly many more, and became the blueprint for the “Final Solution”, through which the Nazis hoped to wipe out Jews, gay people and other minority groups.
Crow’s installation explores the values that allowed T4 to happen but also shows how some disabled people found the courage to resist.
It also draws close parallels with issues that challenge disabled people’s right to exist today, such as disability hate crime, the campaign to legalise assisted suicide and pre-natal screening and abortion.
The installation features a short drama about T4, a filmed conversation between three of the actors, and a series of disembodied voices of present-day disabled people talking about their own experiences of both discrimination and inclusion.
Resistance will next be shown in the UK as part of Portland and Weymouth’s B-Side Festival, at the Brackenbury Methodist Church, Fortuneswell, Portland, Dorset, from Friday 17 to Sunday 26 September.
For more details, visit www.roaring-girl.com/productions/resistance-on-tour/
2 September 2010
UN debate will be reminder of true inclusive education