Poster design by Cecilia Caldiera, with poem by LA Warman.

LA Warman is a poet, performer, and death doula. She teaches writing classes online through The Warman School. Her Instagram is @ warmanschool, and you can find more about her class offerings there.

Cecilia Caldiera is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She uses mainstream iconography and found objects in conjunction with imaginative imagery from mythology and divination to create graphic prints, posters, and paintings.

[Image description: [Digital print in shades of gray, black, red and white] A slim, nymph-like gray figure stands on the toes of its right foot in the center of the page; this foot is planted on the midrib of a large, anthropomorphic leaf, whose white, empty eyes and open mouth stare without expression from the bottom center of the print. The figure’s left leg is bent at the knee as though in motion; its head is turned in three-quarter profile, and its starburst-shaped eye peers straight out at the viewer. In its chest, a small dark humanoid creature rests upside down as though just consumed. The contours of what may be wings enclose the creature and form a vaginal, mouth-like shape around it. The gray nymph seems to erupt in spikes or flames at all its joints, forehead, and jaw. In its left hand, it holds a vessel with a flame hovering above it; its right hand is open and points downward, and seems to beckon a bird or another flame. The right and left borders of the image are pale grays with vertical, undulating white lines; long black candlesticks, lit with small black flames, are superimposed over the gray fields. Winged gargoyles at the base of the candlesticks crouch in full profile, faces pointed towards the center composition. Text in varying shades of gray dances around the gray nymph and the leaf, reading [I SAW DEATH AND I LOOKED RIGHT AT IT I SAW DEATH AND I SAW WHAT IT WAS POWER DEATH IS POWER IS POWER IS DECIDING IS DECIDING WHO LIVES WHO DIES WHO LIVES WHO LIVES AT ALL - L.A. Warman co]

Sick in Quarters (SiQ) is a network of disabled and chronically ill artists and activists, connected to each other and working in collaboration through the internet. Because of our own struggles with self-advocacy, we recognize a need for information that has not been easily shared within our own histories of navigating illness inside bureaucratic systems. Through curating a library of knowledge based on lived experience, in addition to community-building workshops, we seek to empower our comrades and peers with a greater sense of agency while navigating the path of their own care and treatment.

Historically, disability has been the exclusive domain of the biological, social, and cognitive arenas that shape practice in education, rehabilitative medicine, and social work. But people with disabilities never seem to be included in the normative order of things.

There remains much to be learned about understanding disability as part of the larger human experience. Policies and practices that have a direct impact on the material reality of living with disability are rarely examined by society. People with disabilities know that the fundamental issue is not one of an individual’s inabilities or limitations, but rather a hostile unadaptive society.

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