{"id":1248,"date":"2018-09-24T15:30:30","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T15:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/disabilityartsinternational.flywheelsites.com\/resources\/ndaca-the-story-of-one-of-the-worlds-first-disability-arts-archives\/"},"modified":"2019-10-17T12:56:13","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T12:56:13","slug":"ndaca-the-story-of-one-of-the-worlds-first-disability-arts-archives","status":"publish","type":"resources","link":"https:\/\/www.disabilityartsinternational.org\/resources\/ndaca-the-story-of-one-of-the-worlds-first-disability-arts-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"NDACA: the story of one of the world’s first disability arts archives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In June 2018, Shape Arts launched the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA), one of the first of its kind in the world, which chronicles the heritage story of the UK\u2019s Disability Arts Movement and catalogues key pieces from it for posterity. Joe Turnbull speaks to David Hevey, NDACA Project Director and CEO of Shape Arts about this landmark archive.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"David
Project Director, David Hevey examines items from the archive. Image courtesy of NDACA <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NDACA launched with a celebratory event at the UK\u2019s House of Lords on 20 June this year, the culmination of more than six years of development since NDACA was awarded Heritage Lottery Funding<\/a> to realise one of the first ever archives of disability arts. But the groundwork for NDACA far predates 2012. \u201cTony Heaton, Allan Sutherland, Deborah Williams and others had the idea that the art of the Disability Arts Movement should be preserved, and this whole idea of Disability Arts as being ephemeral and not worthy of its heritage place in history had to be contested,\u201d Hevey tells me. \u201cThey had the far-sightedness, going back to late 1980s, but it took time for the outside world to catch up to Disability Arts and counter-culture\u2019s validity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2012, Shape, then headed up by Heaton himself, led a successful partner consortium bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund. That\u2019s when Hevey came on board as Project Director. The project had to go through a lengthy development phase collecting pledges from partners and securing the initial bedrock of the collection, as well as securing major funding from HLF. The delivery phase started in late 2015. To date, the project has received nearly \u00a31 million worth of funding from HLF, Arts Council England<\/a> and Joseph Rowntree Foundation<\/a>. Hevey is unequivocal in the arguing for the importance of this resource:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn my view the Disability Arts Movement helped achieve rights in the mid-90s [with the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act<\/a>], by making visible new identities and new arguments and by presenting a new type of disabled person that was angry and full of agency for change. I think it deserves to be in the pantheon of great radical arts movements alongside things like the Harlem Renaissance. It\u2019s one of the most significant counter-cultural movements of the 20th<\/sup>century. Our ambition for NDACA, along with our partners, is to cement that as a widely held belief. It may take us ten years or more to get it into everyone’s minds! It\u2019s important to collect radical culture, because the margins become the future\u2019s mainstream. People tend to forget that and bulldoze the margins because they are not currently mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disability arts is by no means unique to the UK, but I ask Hevey what it is about the UK context that has allowed initiatives like NDACA to flourish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t want to be chauvinistic nor telling others how to do things. Each movement across the world has its own route to agency. The interesting thing about the UK disability arts and rights movements is that they understood that the state has the money and the power to make changes. The bigger the state, and the more you can contest the state, the more rights you can win. You get the state to fund the rights and the art. Where there\u2019s less of a solidly taxing, reasonably well-off state, it\u2019s harder; in the USA for example, it\u2019s much tougher for the disability rights movement – perhaps.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hevey plucks out a simple example to back up the point. When his team were travelling the country doing their \u2018van and scan\u2019 work \u2013 collecting digital renditions of the objects \u2013 he said they should get in touch with the Culture Minister, Ed Vaisey. \u201cIt\u2019s progressive, diverse content, I knew they\u2019d be on board,\u201d explains Hevey. \u201cWithin an hour of us contacting his office, Vaisey was tweeting about our project.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Multiple
Poppy Nash’s 2018 NDACA protest T-shirt workshop at Tate Modern <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, the ingenuity and initiative shown by groups and individuals within the UK\u2019s Disability Arts Movement played a part in its achievements too. \u201cThe movement in the UK was very media-savvy with things like the block telethon protests and stopping public transport which captured the media\u2019s attention. It had clever slogans like \u2018piss on pity\u2019 and \u2018to boldly go where everyone else has gone before\u2019 which really helped amplify the impact. Lots of people are alienated, so there\u2019s a sort of dog whistle support for a movement that can be seen as sticking it to the man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The intertwined nature of disability arts and rights comes across strongly in NDACA\u2019s framing of the collection. \u201cIf you research the UK\u2019s Disability Arts Movement it\u2019s hard to avoid the fact that it was attached to the rights movement,\u201d explains Hevey. \u201cFor example, Vic Finkelstein played a huge role in setting up both the Union of the physically impaired against segregation and London Disability Arts Forum. But it was a broad movement. The vast majority may not have been political but we focussed in on a particular narrative, because you can\u2019t collect it all. We do have an acquisitions policy, we\u2019re not collecting every moment of disabled people\u2019s art, ever. Nor are we aiming to be the only heritage story of disability arts, even in the UK. This is not a hegemonic voice, it\u2019s a particular promotion of the disability arts movement, with a focus on the radical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Initial responses have been very positive, with a surprisingly broad audience for the collection. \u201cWe\u2019re on audiences of five million to date,\u201d says Hevey. \u201cFor going live, we aimed for 250,000 and we got two million. The reason for that is Design Week carried it as their main story<\/a>. So that week we were in the top 100 trending things on Twitter in the UK. The idea that we were collecting the \u2018heritage of social change\u2019 really appealed to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a project of such size and scope, there are bound to be multiple challenges and lessons learned. Hevey reflects on a few of them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe first issue when undertaking a heritage project of this nature is you have to have the rights first. There were a number of \u2018orphan works\u2019 were you don\u2019t know who the owner is. Under orphan works law you have to do due diligence and find the last person around who might be the rights owner to transfer them. But we couldn\u2019t afford to go to every single rights holder in for example an issue of Disability Arts in London magazine \u2013 there would be dozens in just one edition. We managed to establish a legal principle, solid in law that those people intended for their work to be seen as part of the disability arts story.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Tanya
NDACA depositing artist Tanya Raabe with part of her R:Evolve installation <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe captured all the items digitally in massive RAW files. The reason for that is to avoid digital obsolescence \u2013 in 20 years\u2019 time you\u2019ll still have data files that can be compressed to whatever the emerging public-facing format is. Keep the model of capture radical, across different platforms. But also, you should make sure the collection itself conveys the same radical energy as the content. It should feel live. If you\u2019re not careful it can get safe and soporific.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collection now encompasses 3,500 items, which are all available to view digitally on the NDACA website<\/a>. I ask Hevey if any, in particular, stand out for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the great moments was when Alan Holdsworth aka Johnny Crescendo gave us a box of his t-shirts with all the slogans on from the 1990s. You could smell his sweat and cigarette smoke on them. It was living history. To feel the texture and have you taken back to those days was quite something. The piss on pity t-shirt seems to get the most response from audiences out of any item. At the other end of the scale is Tanya Raabe Webber\u2019s story from being a \u2018handicapped little girl\u2019 profiled in a Northern Echo clipping<\/a> to being a hugely successful painter and us having some of her amazing portraits<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the collection Hevey, an award-winning film and television director has produced 23 films interviewing people from the movement<\/a>. Eventually, 50 will be available. \u201cThey feel like they are in real time,\u201d he explains. \u201cThe films are so slow-paced, that they don\u2019t really work outside the website. But within the context of the archive, they are like live human beings inside this Aladdin\u2019s cave of history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what does the future hold for this landmark archive, and could the model be replicated elsewhere?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are a couple of countries that have a very interesting archive challenge; their state thinks the past isn\u2019t that important. If you\u2019re not careful, under populism, intelligent centres of learning get lost. We are speaking to people in one or two countries about how to keep that story alive and retell it in new forms, how to campaign for the value of a heritage story and the nuances of a previous age. Going forward, the trick is to embed the sustainability. Get large Universities in UK\/US to use these tools and you can achieve real impact. I hope it flourishes and becomes one of the greatest heritage stories. Long may it grow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visit this page for a collection of 1000-word audio-described essays telling the story of a selection of objects from the NDACA Archive<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":1311,"parent":0,"template":"","tags":[],"theme":[86],"artform":[18],"country":[],"resource":[74],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNDACA: the story of one of the world's first disability arts archives - Disability Arts International<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/wordpress-753190-3886878.cloudwaysapps.com\/resources\/ndaca-the-story-of-one-of-the-worlds-first-disability-arts-archives\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"NDACA: the story of one of the world's first disability arts archives - Disability Arts International\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In June 2018, Shape Arts launched the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA), one of the first of its kind in the world, which chronicles the heritage story of the UK\u2019s Disability Arts Movement and catalogues key pieces from it for posterity. 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