Focus: Access and Co-Creation

For information on Accessibility, please consult here.

Easy Read

At the Tieranatomisches Theater, many different people should be able to take part.

We believe:
Disabled people should not only have access to exhibitions and knowledge.
They should also help create knowledge, art, and new ideas.

This is why we work together with blind and partially sighted people, artists, researchers, and other partners.

One important project is called DEEP_ABILITIES.
In this project, we explore the deep sea together through listening, touch, and other ways of sensing.

We want to reduce barriers and develop new forms of knowledge and expression together.

Different Understandings of Inclusion, Participation, and Accessibility

Terms such as inclusion, participation, accessibility, or Access are understood very differently across social, scientific, cultural, and political contexts. Self-advocacy organisations, disability communities, rehabilitation sciences, Disability Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Disability Arts, medicine, cultural institutions, and educational contexts often pursue different approaches and priorities.

We consider this plurality to be productive. At the same time, these perspectives differ in the extent to which they are grounded in the experiences, perspectives, and forms of knowledge of disabled people themselves.

In particular, Critical Disability Studies and Disability Arts have argued over recent decades that accessibility and participation should not only be understood as access to already existing knowledge, institutions, or cultural forms. Instead, they foreground the question of how disabled people themselves actively shape and produce knowledge, culture, aesthetics, and social perspectives.

Why We Use the Term Access

Against this background, the Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T) consciously places the term Access at the centre of its work.

By Access, we do not mean only the removal of barriers or access to existing offers and institutions. Rather, we understand Access as the possibility to participate in the creation of knowledge, cultural forms, and institutional practices.

In doing so, we are particularly guided by Article 30, paragraph 2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which states:

“States Parties shall take appropriate measures to enable persons with disabilities to have the opportunity to develop and utilize their creative, artistic and intellectual potential, not only for their own benefit, but also for the enrichment of society.”

For us, this describes a fundamental shift in perspective: while traditional inclusion measures in cultural institutions often focus on access to already existing knowledge, we understand Access as participation in the creation of new knowledge, new aesthetic forms of expression, and new institutional practices.

We believe that disabled people contribute distinct perspectives, experiences, and forms of knowledge that do not merely expand existing institutions, but can generate new ways of thinking, perceiving, and creating — across art, science, and society.

Access as Collaborative Practice

Since 2025, Access and Co-Creation has become a central area of development at the Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T). Through experimental, research-led, and collaborative practices, we are developing new approaches to Access, multisensory engagement, and disability-centred knowledge production across the intersections of science, visual art, collections, and society.

At TA T, we understand Access not merely as the removal of barriers, but as an ongoing collaborative process that shapes how perception, participation, and knowledge are negotiated across exhibitions, research, and public programmes.

Our work approaches Access as a multisensory, relational, and co-creative practice. This includes questions of how collections and scientific materials can be experienced beyond dominant epistemic, sensory, and representational frameworks, how institutional practices can evolve through collaboration, and how scientific, artistic, and lived forms of knowledge can enter into dialogue on more equal terms.

Rather than treating Accessibility as a fixed institutional standard, we understand Access as a situated and evolving process that requires continuous exchange, collaboration, experimentation, and shared learning.

DEEP_ABILITIES

A central component of this field of work is the long-term project DEEP_ABILITIES (project lead: Felix Sattler), which develops disability-centred and co-creative approaches to deep-sea collections through exhibition practice, visual art, multisensory research, and collaborative knowledge exchange.

Developed together with blind and partially sighted artists, researchers, artistic and scientific advisors, and partner institutions, the project investigates how deep-sea environments and collections can be approached through tactile, acoustic, and non-visual forms of engagement.

At the same time, the project explores how disability-centred perspectives can contribute to new forms of knowledge production and institutional practice within collection-based, scientific, and artistic contexts.

Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange

Through long-term collaborations with museums, universities, artists, researchers, and disability-centred practitioners, TA T aims to contribute to the development of experimental methodologies and transferable practices for Access and multisensory engagement.

This includes collaborative research projects, fellowships, multisensory exhibition formats, workshops, public programmes, and institutional exchange formats that engage questions of perception, participation, and Access across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

In the long term, we hope to contribute through experimental and research-led collaborations to broader discussions around disability-centred Access and collaborative practice within cultural, scientific, and collection-based contexts.

On the Terminology Used

Some of the terms used in this field, such as Access, Accessibility, or disability-centred, are also intentionally used in English within our German-language contexts.

These terms have largely been shaped by disabled communities themselves and have developed in more differentiated ways within Critical Disability Studies and international Disability Arts, museum, and research contexts than many of their current German-language equivalents.

They are therefore also widely used within German-speaking disability, arts, and research contexts, where they often make visible specific social, political, and epistemic perspectives that cannot easily be translated directly into German.