Crip Resistance: Holding Space, Building Community
A collaborative programme from Resting Up Collective & Ort Gallery
Feb – May 2025 | Online (with one in-person event)
Resting Up Collective (RUC) is thrilled to announce our biggest programme to date, in collaboration with Ort Gallery!
Crip Resistance: Holding Space, Building Community is a rich online programme exploring disabled, sick, mad, and crip modes of resistance and remote community care. From February through May 2025, we’ll be hosting artist talks, workshops, film screenings, and live performance events.
The programme will also feature a print and online publication expanding on the programme’s themes, and we have curated a book collection for the Birmingham Resistance Library (BRL).
20% of event and publication proceeds will go to Gaza Sunbirds.
We’re running this programme on Crip Time—meaning events may shift if contributors experience changes in capacity. We honour rest, care, and adaptability.
About the Organisers
Resting Up Collective is an interdisciplinary group of chronically ill and disabled friends practising slowness and Crip Time to create, think, and interrupt neoliberal expectations of productivity. We hold space through workshops and creative experiments for the crip community.
Ort Gallery is a visual arts and poetry organisation in Birmingham, committed to redefining contemporary visual arts. With Warmth as our ethos, we challenge elitism in the art world and centre inclusive, care-focused practices.
Programme Overview
[PAST]
Crip Resistance: Braidings
Thursday 29th May, 19:30 onwards
Book for Crip Resistance: Braidings and find out more
Join Resting Up Collective and Ort Gallery for the final event in the programme Crip Resistance: Holding Space, Building Community for a one-off remote performance of Braidings.
Long-term musical and literary collaborators CN Lester, Miss Jacqui and Jamie Hale come together in an interwoven night of songs and poetry. This richly textured show combines original and unheard music, spoken word, and poetry with covers and reimaginations of work by the disabled, black, queer and trans ancestors who sustain us. Braidings is an evening to uphold and acknowledge, to uplift, inspire, and reclaim our power.
Run time: 1.5 hours approx. with duration of performance roughly around 60 - 80 mins. Please note this may be subject to change.
Content warning: Some of the spoken word and song lyrics refer to adult themes that may be upsetting for viewers. References to death, illness, violence, discrimination, sex and sexual violence.
About the Artists
Jamie - Jamie Hale is an award-winning poet, performer and director whose work explores physical embodiment in nature, fragility, queerness, and mortality. They write “arresting, heart-stopping poems lit with a rare intensity”, and were awarded the Evening Standard Director/Theatremaker of the Year award in 2021 for their first poetry play, NOT DYING. They’ve performed at venues including the Barbican Centre, Tate Modern, Southbank Centre, HOME Manchester, and Theatre Royal Stratford East, and founded the award-winning CRIPtic Arts. They are currently developing a new adaption of Romeo and Juliet and completing their first full poetry collection.
https://jamiehale.co.uk/; https://cripticarts.org/
CN - CN Lester is a singer-songwriter whose music combines piano, voice, and lyrics to form an intimate, arresting whole. They’ve performed extensively throughout the UK, bars, galleries and coffee shops, and at venues including The Arts Club, HOME Manchester, Tate Modern, Barbican, The Royal Exchange, RVT, Dalston Superstore, and Prides from Bath to Brighton, Manchester to Happy Valley. As well as an alternative musician, they are a classical singer and composer and are working on their next album, Fellow Travellers, a novel, and a follow-up to their critically acclaimed book Trans Like Me.
https://www.cnlester.com/
Miss Jacqui - Miss Jacqui is a poet and songwriter who knows a great deal about working with the cards that you are dealt, as a black woman who uses a wheelchair. In her 15+ year career of fusing poetry and spoken word, she has performed at the 2012 Paralympic Welcoming Ceremony and Opening Ceremony, the Southbank Centre, the Barbican and the Roundhouse. Her first EP, Perception, was “soulful and spirited”, a punchy and poignant reclamation of space. She is preparing to release her first album.
https://www.missjacqui.co.uk/
[PAST]
Crip Resistance: Zine Making with Dolly Sen
Thursday 22nd May 2025 | 14:00–16:00
Book tickets to Zine Making with Dolly Sen
Dolly wants you to join them in a zine workshop like no other, where Crip Resistance takes centre stage in all its unruly glory. With their trademark wit, radical tenderness, and punk spirit, Dolly will guide participants through the art of zine-making as a tool of rebellion, survival, defiance, and joy with just one A3 sheet of paper to start off with.
Participants will receive materials via post, but feel free to bring anything you want to subvert to the workshop, such as NHS leaflets, medical notes, etc.
Content Warning: This workshop may include discussions around triggering subjects.
About the Artist
Dolly Sen (she/they) is an internationally renowned writer, filmmaker, artist and activist. She disrupts systems producing oppression, not through trojan horse viruses but with my little ponies on acid with a little sadness in their hearts.
Dolly lives in Norwich with her partner and dog.
[PAST]
Crip Resistance: ‘we have a right to make the universe we dream’ – using disability manifestos as creative tools
Tuesday 13th May | 18–19:30 pm
Book onto the manifesto workshop and read more about it
Join resting up members Char and Jen to write and reflect on disability justice manifestos as tools for organising and creativity. Through a series of short readings and writing/art prompts, this session aims to inspire participants to demand and dream alternative futures through a crip lens.
About the Facilitators
Char Heather is a writer, researcher and workshop facilitator interested in crip narratives and narrative cripping. They are the founder and steward of the remote body, a project that hosts online workshops that centre chronically ill and disabled folk. Their work has been published in The Polyphony, Lassitude, Futch and others.
Jennifer Brough is a queer, disabled slow writer and workshop facilitator based in Nottingham. She writes poetry and short stories exploring the body, pain, and horror using a magical, surrealist lens and has been published in Ache Magazine, Lassitude, SICK Magazine, and others. Jennifer founded resting up collective, an interdisciplinary group of sick creatives offering workshops and projects that centre disability as creative tools.
[SOLD OUT]
Crip Resistance: Writing from Bed, 2nd Iteration
With Olivia Spring
Wednesday 7th May 2025 | 18:00–19:30
More information about Writing from Bed
In response to popular demand we have scheduled a second iteration of this event. Offering places to those on the waitlist first. The spaces are limited due to the logistics of the event in which participants share progress and receive feedback.
Join Olivia Spring for a relaxed writing workshop on themes of resistance through the lens of chronic illness and disability. We will start with a simple exercise, then read and briefly discuss excerpts of text by disabled writers such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, which will lead into further prompts that build off each other.
No writing experience is required, and there is no requirement to share writing during the session. Participants will also come away with writing of their own and a recommended reading list relating to these themes.
About the Artist:
Olivia Spring is the founder and editor of SICK, a magazine exploring chronic illness and disability. Her work has appeared in It’s Nice That, the Guardian, An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, and rekto:verso, among others. She has been awarded residencies at Monson Arts and Hewnoaks and has hosted talks and workshops for Edmonton Poetry Festival, College of the Atlantic, League of Canadian Poets, Colby College, and more. She lives a slow life in Maine with her dog, Black Bean.
Instagram: @OliviaLSpring / @aSICKmagazine
[PAST]
Crip Resistance: Writing from Bed
With Olivia Spring
Wednesday 30 April 2025 | 18:00–19:30
Book a ticket to Writing from Bed
Join Olivia Spring for a relaxed writing workshop on themes of resistance through the lens of chronic illness and disability. We will start with a simple exercise, then read and briefly discuss excerpts of text by disabled writers such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, which will lead into further prompts that build off each other.
No writing experience is required, and there is no requirement to share writing during the session. Participants will also come away with writing of their own and a recommended reading list relating to these themes.
About the Artist:
Olivia Spring is the founder and editor of SICK, a magazine exploring chronic illness and disability. Her work has appeared in It’s Nice That, the Guardian, An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, and rekto:verso, among others. She has been awarded residencies at Monson Arts and Hewnoaks and has hosted talks and workshops for Edmonton Poetry Festival, College of the Atlantic, League of Canadian Poets, Colby College, and more. She lives a slow life in Maine with her dog, Black Bean.
Instagram: @OliviaLSpring / @aSICKmagazine
[PAST]
Crip Resistance: Creating Identity Charms
Credit: image courtesy of artist
With Phoebe Kaniewska
Wednesday 16 April 2025 | 18:00–20:00
Find out more about Crip Resistance: Creating Identity Charms
Make charms inspired by your identity using metal foil and ribbon. Artist Phoebe Kaniewska shares the history of charms and her ‘Endometriosis Charms’ work.
In this online workshop, Phoebe will guide you through a short history of the importance of charms, and her own work ‘Endometriosis Charms’, before you can make your own. You will use embossing and engraving techniques to create your own hanging charms or mobiles out of foil metal and ribbon, inspired by your own identity. Materials will be provided and delivered via post.
Content warning: the workshop involves using sharp objects and points, like scissors, maths compasses, participants must feel comfortable using sharp objects for craft purposes independently.
About the Artist
Phoebe Kaniewska (She/Her) is a socially engaged artist, facilitator and curator from South London, who uses her lived experience working in healthcare, chronic illness and disability to shape her artistic practice. She strongly believes in the therapeutic benefit of art, both for the maker and audience.
Instagram: @phoebe_kaniewska
[PAST]
HALO/ECHO: A Walk Without Walking
Credit: image courtesy of artist
Tuesday 8 April 2025 | 16:00–17:00
Find out more about HALO/ECHO: A Walk Without Walking
A guided walk without walking with artist Sop:
‘The world and the living are nothing but a halo, an echo of the relation that binds them together.’ - Emanuele Coccia (The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, 2018)
Prompted by their experience of visiting landscapes in recurring dreams, Sop invites participants on a ‘walk/shop’ – where you don’t have to move, and which you can take part in from your bed, sofa or living room floor.
Using sound, somatic exercises and herbal tools, and prioritising comfort and autonomy, you will be guided into a liminal state in which to take a walk through a landscape from your own memory or dreams.
Reflecting on your experience, you will then be invited to note down features, sensations, emotions and any narrative from your ‘walk’, and share this with your fellow walkers, if desired. In doing so we can attempt to collectivise the individual experiences, travelling together between our dreamed or remembered landscapes.
Instagram: @sop__sop__sop
[PAST]
RUC x BRL Curated Collection Launch + Read and Reflect Circle
Saturday 8 February 2025 | 13:00–17:30
Location: Birmingham Resistance Library
Learn more about RUC x BRL Curated Collection
A curated collection of books on disability, care, and resistance was launched with BRL, followed by a Read and Reflect Circle led by Lucy Lopez and Sahjan Kooner on Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
This was the only in-person event.
BSL interpretation provided.
[PAST]
Crip Love, Care & Collaboration in Film
Credit: image courtesy of artist
Thursday 20 February 2025 | 18:00–20:00
Read more about Crip Love, Care & Collaboration in Film
Partners in art and life, Charlie Fitz and Oscar Vinter discussed how their relationship of interdependent care has influenced their collaborative and independent art practice, specifically their filmmaking. This discussion was followed by a screening of several of their short art films. The films explored dancing, masking, ableism, medical bureaucracy, care, the body, identity, hysteria and the occult. The session ended with an informal Q&A discussion.
About the Artists:
Oscar Vinter (he/they) is an afropean neurodivergent artist, composer and filmmaker.
Charlie Fitz (she/they) is a sick and disabled artist, arts practitioner, writer and member of Resting Up Collective.
Subscribe and follow @RestingUpCollective_ and @OrtGallery for updates.
With care,
Resting Up Collective