Panel Discussion: Neurodiversity & Languaging

This panel is convened to discuss the work of Adam Wolfond and Dis Assembly, presented in the exhibition What If My Body Is A Beacon For The World? at Koffler Arts (January 9 - 26, 2025). Poetry and artistic processes merge in this exhibition that explores autistic perception and movement as well as the techniques required to support and collaborate with autistic people beyond therapy.

The panel will include Adam Wolfond, Adam's mother and the co-founder of Dis Assembly Dr. Estée Klar as well as Dr. Erin Manning, professor of fine art at Concordia university and neurodiversity scholar along with Chris Martin, a neurodivergent poet.

Wolfond’s work asks us to reconsider autism as relational, where the vectors of human and more-than-human interrelationality come together in a fractalized perception of spacetime, and raises questions about neurotypicality and the dominant normative forms in which we have all been taught to move and think.

All panelists will provide a brief presentation on their work with Wolfond and other neurodiverse people, and how the processes with Dis Assembly participants are mutual collaborations rather than hierarchical assignments.

Panelists include:

Distantism vs Relation: our wanting way of support and creative collaboration

Dr. Estée Klar, artist, critical disabilities/neurodiversity scholar and Director of Dis Assembly, Toronto

Adam Wolfond, man of autism, author, artist, and director of video/sound installation, What If My Body Is A Beacon For The World?, Toronto

A Feeling for Others Feeling You

Dr. Erin Manning, Faculty of Fine Art at Concordia University and Director of 3 Ecologies Project, Montreal

The Beckon, the Buttress, and the Ceaseless Rally

Chris Martin, poet and author of May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism and Our Neurodiverse Future and Director of Unrestricted Editions, El Cerrito, California

The program will include discussion among the panelists and questions from the audience.