The only way to survive is to rely on our communities

Conversation with Sara Wylie on cinema, disability and the power of communities
Interview by Ira Tantsiura

Resistance Meditation is made as a manifesto on Crip Time. What messages, standpoints or perspectives on disability also influenced your work?

 I spent most of my life as an able-bodied person and then became ill over the past decade. As I got sicker, did a lot of reading and started to get deeply invested in the principles of disability justice. A few things that I had read at the time of making “Resistance Meditation” were very formative for me and my practice. Johanna Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory” was a huge inspiration. I have always been a politically engaged person, and used to be an activist/organizer protesting in the streets, and suddenly that wasn’t available to me. I was bedridden and housebound. So this question of how do you stay active and involved in the world when you can’t get out of bed is still massive for me and is central to my artistic practice. 

I also read the book Health Communism¹ by Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton in a reading group. It raises a question: if many of us are eager to seek an anti-capitalist world and we want a systemic revolution, why aren’t disabled people in the centre of it? Many disabled people are already living outside of capitalist norms and viewed as a ‘surplus’ class and their experience could be learnt from. Those two books just really gave me a completely new perspective on disability as a space of possibility, as opposed to something that was limiting or taking away things from me as a bedridden person.

And then I learnt about Crip Time from reading Alison Kafer – the idea that disabled people function on a different timeline, which is often non-linear and outside of capitalist and productive time. Personally, I was having this psychedelic experience, being stuck in bed and finding time moving very, very slowly, but also paradoxically so quickly. So Crip Time became an exciting concept of ways in which disabled people are already living outside of a linear capitalist reality and imagining new ways of being.

For me, those were significant influences within the current disability discourse that this film was born out of.

The description of the film Resistance Meditation mentions that it’s been self-processed. Can you tell a bit more what this process implies?

I started this project  in a film eco-processing workshop here in Vancouver with the local experimental film group called Xinema, and they’re wonderful. Eco-processing means that you’re not using typical chemical developers, which are quite toxic – instead, you’re using organic, non-toxic materials, like plants. We used dandelions, weeds, and flowers to develop the film, followed by washing soda, vitamin C, and then an eco-fixer. It’s a non-toxic DIY process. As a person who’s chemically sensitive and ill, it’s important to be able to make my work and develop it using these non-toxic processes. And in the end you don’t have all this chemical waste that you have to dispose of as well. There’s a really nice connection between eco-processing and a disability-informed practice, as well as environmental practice. Aesthetically it is also beautiful – with the textures, grains and scratches that are produced on the film in the process.

Eco-processing also implies that you’re not sending it away to a lab and that you have to put in the time to process it yourself. For me, this aligns with the concept of Crip Time as well, in the way that you’re spending intentional time with the film and moving slowly with it through each stage of development.

You are frequently referring to the memories and archives in your work, be it the preservation of personal experiences in Resistance Meditation, personal and national archives in A More Radiant Sphere to uncover the story of your great-uncle Joe Wallace, or the film “The Garden Collective” about the memorial in the form of a garden dedicated to incarcerated women who lost their lives in prison. What makes you particularly interested in archiving and preservation of memories?

I love doing archival research. If I didn’t go to film school, I would have chosen to do an archival studies degree. There’s something so magical to me about entering an archive, and hunting for stories, media and ephemera. The film A More Radiant Sphere was an archival project about a long-lost family member on my dad’s side. I mostly didn’t know this side of my family; I was raised by my mom. So it was a journey of self-discovery through the archive and finding out about Joe Wallace, an incredibly interesting Communist poet who was a political prisoner here in Canada. I went on this Canada-wide trip from Halifax to Toronto to Vancouver to learn about his story. And then within the film, I composed a ‘speculative archive’ – a recreation of sorts – because there was no actual archival film on him.

The Garden Collective also is archival-based. It contains personal archives and photos of the previously incarcerated women of the Prison for Women Memorial Collective, contrasted with the state archive, which functions more as a sensationalist prison tourist attraction.I think there are two main focuses of my work. I would have continued to make more political archival work if I hadn’t become disabled, and now going in this different direction with my latest films, which are mostly focusing on disability and illness. I have yet to make a film that kind of bridges disability and archival work, but that is something I’d like to do. I think there’s something to be said about how archives are not often disability-friendly and very often not accessible. And I know there’s some great work being done by a group called Disability Archives Lab in Montreal on this issue. Making archives accessible is crucial so there can be more disabled archivists and a greater preservation of disabled people’s history.

In your film A More Radiant Sphere, you mention that things that are no longer threatening to power are getting their place in the archives. Do you think there are certain issues in Canada not archived and silenced? 

Absolutely, that was the focus of both A More Radiant Sphere and The Garden Collective – what gets included in the official settler state archives and why. The film The Garden Collective I made with the Prison for Women Memorial Collective; they are a group of previously incarcerated women in the first federal women’s prison in Canada. It has a long and violent history, and a lot of women suffered terrible treatment there. And it finally closed because of these issues. These women have been trying to build a memorial garden to their fallen sisters on a lot that sat vacant for decades and they’ve been having an incredibly hard time doing it. The state, the city of Kingston and the university that’s nearby have been resistant towards their efforts to memorialise the incarcerated women and recognise what they suffered in this prison. It was an intentionally abolitionist film that wasn’t focusing on why these women were in prison but rather why they are trying to memorialise this experience now. Why is it so important that this history doesn’t get lost? Many of the women would say because prison conditions have not improved in Canada and this kind of maltreatment is still an ongoing issue in Canada and disproportionately affecting Indigenous women.

In A More Radiant Sphere, Joe Wallace mentions in writing that he still has confidence in the future, even if he could see it through the window of a prison. In the current state of things, where we can witness several wars and genocides, conservative backlashes and the curbing even that minimum progressive legislation that exists, can you say that you have this confidence in the future?

As bleak as things feel, I am very inspired by disability justice organizers and disabled people who continue to look after each other. Just look at how mutual aid networks developed in the beginning of the pandemic and still exist to this day, when we’re still dealing with COVID-19. We have groups like care networks, mask blocks and pods, and we take turns taking care of each other when we have the money, spoons, and time.  

The only way in which we’re going to survive is by relying on our communities and networks, not the state, to look after each other. And that’s been a huge lesson for me to learn because suddenly, I was disabled and had all these needs that I couldn’t  take care of on my own, and I had to depend on others. And in return, I also learned how to take care of and show up for other disabled people. I think disability is inherently interdependent and also uncovers the falsehood of individualised neoliberal lives, where we are all just expected to take care of ourselves alone and health is a personal responsibility, not a social one. Further, disability justice has taught me that all of our struggles are connected, like in the incredible organizing of Crips for Esims for Gaza.

I also have to add, I feel so grateful for my online disabled community that I’ve found and the many friendships I have made through social media that have really helped me feel seen and brought me into this sense of crip solidarity. This incredible community has also helped this little film travel as far as it has, which has meant the world to me.

1. While in the West communism was strongly linked with ideas of universal healthcare, social housing, and fair wages and was severely persecuted by the state, the legacies of post-socialist countries were far more complex, with histories of repression, imperialism, and generational trauma. Acknowledging these complexities allows us to overcome simplifications and labelling in tackling much-needed ideas of mutual aid, solidarity, and egalitarian futures. ↩︎