Disability Art, Visibility and the Right to the City: The Trazos Singulares (2011) Exhibit at Madrid’s Nuevos Ministerios Metro Station

“Inclusion and equity are mighty tasks that require artful social imagination and the commitment of material resources.”

(Roman, “Disability Arts and Culture as Public Pedagogy” 61)

During May 2011 (ending May 15th) an intriguing exhibition titled Trazos Singulares was on display at Madrid’s north-central metro station of Nuevos Ministerios. The exhibition comprised some sixty works by thirty artists with developmental disabilities, and significantly, the work of artistic production was itself performed on site between the 5th and the 8th of April.¹ This simple decision has an understated significance. Many times, of course, the public appearance of the artistic work is separated in space and time from the moment of its production such that the artistic product takes on an existence separated from the producer. Those who appreciate art tend to become accustomed to this sort of disembodiment. Nonetheless, if we are to take to heart the somewhat predictably rhetorical spirit of the speech with which José Ignacio Echeverría inaugurated the exhibition at the Nuevos Ministerios station—(“El arte no entiende diferencias ni conoce barreras sino que promueve la integración y la autonomía de las personas”)—the artistic producers of the Trazos Singulares exhibition are not merely being integrated symbolically through the integration of their artwork into Madrid’s transportation network, they are also being integrated physically, even if ephemerally (“Inauguración”).

It is certainly clear that there exists a certain kind of sporadic and somewhat showy form of outreach by companies using disabled populations for causes that have just as much to do with their own public-relations plans as they do with the notion of accommodating marginalized communities. Such outreach cannot abrogate the need for sustainable and lasting financial and institutional support from governments as well as the necessity of resituating the disabled/able-bodied dichotomy. Yet there is something unconventional and intriguing about this particular event. Although it may admittedly be a far cry from sustainable and unconditional support for disabled populations, the decision to have the artists paint in the Madrid metro station itself nonetheless reflects, I believe, a somewhat more sophisticated understanding of the historical legacy of the paradoxical visibility/invisibility of disability than would be reflected in the decision to showcase their works alone. Disability-philosopher Licia Carlson compellingly writes in her work The Faces of Intellectual Disability of the way in which “intellectual disability [ … ] has been made both socially visible and invisible” (46). Historically speaking, the institutionalized classification/codification of people with intellectual disabilities made them highly visible from a clinical (and social) standpoint just as their incarceration in “institutions far from public view” was intended to render them seemingly invisible to the public at large (Carlson, Faces 46; see also Davis, Enforcing Normalcy 73, 94-95, 173; Siebers, Disability Theory 99-109). Trazos Singulares thus ultimately succeeds in that it renders the contributing artists as (momentarily) socially visible, in the process drawing attention to the embodied nature of all artistic production.

This article uses the social context of the exhibition and the subject matter of the artists’ paintings (scenes of various landmarks and public spaces in Madrid including various buildings and metro stations) as a way of asking more provocative questions about the right to the city experienced by disabled populations (Lefebvre, The Right). Analysis draws from both disability studies scholars and Henri Lefebvre’s urban theory while highlighting the insufficient public recognition of developmental disabilities in particular (as in the recent 2010 documentary Capacitados), as well as outreach efforts and televised spots supported by other agencies such as Down España, and even articles of the recent UN Convention on the rights of people with disabilities.

Disability Art / Intellectual and Developmental Disability (IDD) in Spain

Generally speaking, disability studies has long signaled the importance of embodiment. To the extent that “The political unconscious upholds a delicious ideal of social perfection by insisting that any public body be flawless,” this unconscious also “displaces manifestations of disability from collective consciousness […] through concealment, cosmetic action, motivated forgetting, and rituals of sympathy and...