Cloudspotting Shining a light on hidden disabilities
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When inviting people to rest, we found that we are able to tell difficult stories about the lived experience of disability without people turning away because they’re held in this very beautiful way.
DISABLED Bristol artistic performer, who has to lie down at regular intervals because of chronic pain, is raising awareness of hidden disabilities.
Raquel Meseguer founded the Unchartered Collective platform in 2016 and has since dedicated her career to creating immersive performances for those who want to understand what it is like to have an invisible disability.
The Unchartered Collective’s first piece, Someone Should Start Laughing premiered in 2017. Through sound, touch, silence, laughter and dance, the show followed the personal stories of being diagnosed and living with invisible impairments like chronic pain.
Following the success of the show, Raquel started challenging the etiquette of ‘resting’ by lying down and demonstrating her disability’s access needs in public spaces all over the UK.
Through her projects, the award-winning artist seeks to challenge the etiquette of how we treat our public spaces and advocates for cultural institutions to support the need for accessible resting areas and horizontal events for those in persistent pain.
Raquel demonstrated horizontal accessibility in partnership with The Watershed cinema in Bristol, where it is possible to lie down to watch any film screened there.
Following the success of her advocacy work, ‘Cloudspotting’ became the term used by Raquel to communicate the collective needs of the thousands of people in the UK living in chronic pain who need to lie down and rest at frequent intervals, regardless of whether they are in private or not.
The practice of public resting inspired an ongoing project called A Crash Course in Cloudspotting, which is an immersive experience designed to explore disability through the use of anecdotal stories and technology.
The artists invite the audience members to spectate the show by lying down in a vulnerable, ‘resting’ position, to bridge an understanding between able-bodied audiences and the lived experience of people with ‘hidden’ disabilities.
When explaining why she chose to encourage audience participation, Raquel said: “When people spectate from lying down, we have a different sense of self and we’re normally more open and vulnerable.”
“So when inviting people to rest, we found that we are able to tell difficult stories about the lived experience of disability without people turning away because they’re held in this very beautiful way. They’re held within rest.”
Raquel said that the unusual type of spectatorship encourages empathic listening, which helps audience members to relate to their lived experiences.
She said: “People seem to embed the stories in their own world and I think that does build an important bridge between a largely hidden community of people with hidden disabilities and our audiences.”
The project involves the retelling of over 250 first-person stories about the struggles and experiences of public resting, communicated through spoken word, a mobile app, movement and music.
Just like Someone Should Start Laughing, Raquel wants her audiences to leave A Crash Course in Cloudspotting feeling compelled to see their surroundings populated with different people, all with different stories to tell.
Raquel also runs a monthly space called Cloud Spotter’s Cafe for people who have been involved in the Cloudspotting project, to connect and share experiences using poetry, movement and other artistic expressions.