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To mark the beginning of the season of exhibitions entitled “Normes Corps,” and in line with the Palais de Tokyo’s work on inclusion and mental health, this issue of P L  S magazine features a constellation of professionals from the contemporary artistic and theoretical fields whose practices are traversed by questions of care and accessibility and by the experience of disability. While these are all historically anchored in political struggles, they are now fully present in contemporary creation, with artists at the forefront of this engagement. More specifically, recent years have seen increasing awareness of ableism: of a system that establishes, by way of physical, psychological and intellectual criteria, a hierarchy between bodies judged as either “normal” or “abnormal.”

It is in the challenge that it poses to such discriminating standards that the subversive power of disability makes itself felt. It emerges as a critical space which interrogates the foundations of a society that has crystallised around ideals of performance, speed, autonomy, immediate productivity and pushing beyond one’s boundaries. It encourages us to value difference, dysfunction and fragility, approaching them not as insufficiencies or pathologies in need of cure or correction, but rather as particular and multiple identities to be preserved and affirmed through the cultivation of interdependence, attention and tactical dodges; it incites us to draw upon experiences of the world that reveal the restrictive frameworks of the dominant social order and its infrastructures that hamper, exclude and stigmatise. In the artistic realm, these subversive practices trace out the contours of an aesthetic in the etymological sense of the term, that of a sensitivity or a sensibility. They shake up sensory experience through alternative forms that expand the frameworks of representation and that escape the strictures of beauty or taste.

As the collective Les Handi·es Tordu·es explains, “validity, or able-bodiedness is a provisional state; ageing, an accident, an illness or a change in the criteria of the ableist system are enough to exclude our bodies from the norm.” Far from being a marginal state, fragility is a condition of existence, probably the most widely shared by all humanity and by the living world beyond. Disability brings into play fragilities of all kinds, whether temporary or permanent, visible or invisible. By recognising and appreciating the fragility that links us to one another and by considering our vulnerability as a creative property to be held dear, we open up perspectives that can reach across culture and society as a whole: this kind of attention to supposedly minoritarian positions shows that, in reality, they speak for the many.

Moreover, these issues raise concrete questions of accessibility for our institutions. They transform us from within and show us all that is left to do in terms of the accessibility of spaces, works and texts, as well as in our ways of working with artists, audiences and colleagues.

This season of exhibitions and this issue of P L  S are also an invitation to play with contradiction and discordance, to celebrate the explosion of life in a regime of vulnerability and of joy in a regime on uncertainty, to become aware of fragility as a sensitive and sensory experience, a creative intensity and a broadening of the horizons of possibility. What if we were to upturn the order of things? What if awareness of fragility were to contaminate the world of the “able”? What if, through the magic of art, we were to transform compassion into passion, constraint into intensity, and the ordinary into poetry?