KCJ Szwedzinski recently told students, “As a disability rights advocate and disabled woman, I make ableist work.” As a visual artist, she makes work that relies on sight as an access point. Spending time as an EAiR, she will experiment with work that doesn’t rely solely on sight for engagement. Szwedzinski’s proposal considers cultural diffusion through the exploration of a noise making device called a ratchet; a simple instrument made of three parts: a cog, a handle, and a weighted slat. Several cultures adopted the instrument for its simplistic form but changed its context and name. Cultural diffusion is the mechanism that causes ideas to be adopted, re-imagined, and re-purposed from culture to culture. Ratchets aren’t the only example of one object migrating across different groups of people. Much of her past work investigates cultural diffusion through the lens of the Jewish diaspora.
She seeks to understand how historical narratives migrate and become weaponized or manipulated to benefit some and injure others. Areas of research include literature of the Holocaust, the male dominated textual legacy of Judaism and the separation, or lack, of church and state in Catholicism. Her work centers ritual and object to ask if there are relative or absolute delineations within and between categories such as religion, culture, ethnicity, and nationality. Szwedzinski seeks to question if there are hard and fast boundaries to belief and classification systems. When closely examined; is it things taught or lived experience that shape a person more?
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