A multi-module exhibition designed for virtual consumption, Indisposable: Structures of Support After the Americans with Disabilities Act, curated by Jessica Cooley and Ann Fox for the Ford Foundation Gallery, interrogates accessibility in the art world today, drawing together leading scholars, artists, and writers, in conversation and curated over Zoom. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, (ADA) Chapter 1 debuted the newest work of interdisciplinary artist Alex Dolores Salerno, El Dios Acostado, a film set in the small towns of Vilcabamba and San Pedro de la Bendita, in Southern Ecuador.

The artist’s mother grew up in San Pedro de la Bendita, near Vilcabamba and its defining mountain, Mandango, or “The Sleeping God.” The valley nestled below this mountain was made famous by a variety of gerontological studies in the 20th century, as well as a notable National Geographic cover story. During the 70s, many European and American scientists explored the region known for producing individuals who lived well over age 100, and gave the town the name “the valley of longevity”. These interventions, while putting Vilcabamba on the map for many, led to an influx of parasitic-tourism: wealthy European and Americans, often retirees who call themselves “expats”, looking for longer life, youth, and cures to illnesses. The newcomers’ presence and their ideas of productivity and extraction brought about profound change to the site historically considered a sacred land of rest.

Visiting San Pedro de la Bendita with their partner, Salerno directed a short film focused on only three scenes, marching along at a “pace of rest” that facilitated multiple levels of accessibility for a variety of possible disabled audiences. The three frames were filmed as settled stationary images of a man in repose before the mountain, a cemetery, and a rooftop townscape. From narration in both Spanish and English (voiced by the artist’s own mother and partner, Echo) to bilingual subtitles and descriptions of scenes and landscapes, Salerno is attuned to a variety of ways in which traditional video art can exclude audiences with audio or visual impairments, and argues that accessibility is both an exciting and necessary part of the making process.

After the airing of Chapter 1, I caught up with artist Alex Dolores Salerno about their work, career, and the new film, El Dios Acostado.  

Emily Conklin: How did you come to filmmaking, and how was this work been informed by your heritage and personal experience?

Alex Dolores Salerno: Through themes of care, interdependency, and queer-crip temporality, in my interdisciplinary practice I work to critique standards of productivity and the commodification of our rest time. My practice argues that to celebrate different bodyminds necessitates are configuration of value and our relationship to time on a capitalist agenda.  

Unfortunately capitalism values us based on our capacity to work as self-reliant individuals despite the ways that we are all interdependent and reliant on care. My new film, El Dios Acostado was a new direction for me in terms of medium and aesthetics, but at the same time has been a natural progression in my practice. I have been working, primarily in sculpture and photography, with the bed and bedding materials as a site of creation, protest, and mutual aid, so my interest in the power of rest and collectivity allowed me to begin this work by shifting the sleeping figure from the bed onto a sacred land of rest. The first step in creating the film was taking a nap in front of a mountain named Mandango which translates to “The Sleeping God” or “El Dios Acostado”. Due to my physical and mental conditions, rest is something I often feel I have to fight for, and this work was very much informed by the necessity of rest and what the land has to teach us about slowing down.

 EC: Did you initially approach filmmaking as a space for exploration of accessibility or did your accessibility work evolve over the course of your filmmaking practice?

ADS: Regardless of medium, access is both necessary and an exciting rich material to work with. Whether it’s architecture, a social event, or an art piece, access shouldn’t be an afterthought. The elements of access in El Dios Acostado evolved as the film evolved since they aren’t separate things.

EC: Why did you choose to alternate between narrators with and without accents in their non-native languages? Does the phenomenon of the linguistic accent play into access in your art? 

ADS: This was something very simple for me. I wanted my mother, a narrator in the film, to speak for herself. She first spoke in Spanish and then translated herself by repeating her words in English. I spoke the English visual descriptions as a way to be in dialogue with my mother, but because my Spanish isn’t great I asked my partner and collaborator Echo to say them in Spanish (he also was the one sleeping in front of Mandango). So there are different levels of accents simply because I wanted these people to have their voices in the film, and to honor all the ways we come into language and have the multiplicity of sound and accents be a beautiful thing.