Unbuilt Environments

Alistair Gentry / United Kingdom / Video Loop / 2024 / International Premiere / 54 min

Unbuilt Environments was commissioned by UCL’s (University College London) Trellis scheme for collaboration between artists and researchers. Working alongside computer science researcher and disability activist Anna Landre, and based at the Global Disability Innovation Hub at UCL, Anna and artist Alistair Gentry worked with disabled people near to UCL’s new campus in East London to discuss and manifest their experiences of the built environment. This included groups and individuals with a wide range of disabilities, from mobility to visual impairment or blindness. Particular attention was paid to the social model of disability, in which it is not disabled people who are deficient or at fault but instead society that disables us – through our employers, through the state, via our communities, via culture as a whole – because of wider society’s inability (or unwillingness) to understand and adapt to the differing needs of D/deaf, disabled, chronically ill, mentally il, or neurodivergent people. The installation shows a series of scenes inspired by these conversations; some are specific to the culture(s) of East London – Cockney rhyming slang, for example, in which raspberry ripple (a type of ice cream) is a euphemism for the outdated term “cripple”– and some relate to experiences common to many disabled people of being stranded, abandoned, humiliated, pitied, or constantly reminded of their difference, or to their reclamation of terms such as “crip” or “mad.” The choice of using Unreal Engine, often used for building video games or architectural visualisations, also references the need for escape and respite through gaming, science fiction, and other media that disabled people often spoke of to us, and that we recognised in ourselves… but even these spaces can be problematic for a disabled person as they too often reify the idea of a “normal” body and its opposites, or thoughtlessly reproduce tropes related to injury, illness and disability as sites of horror or sources of corruption and evil.

Funded by the Trellis Programme at UCL.

About the artists

Alistair Gentry is a writer, artist, performer and producer from the UK. He lives in London. He makes live art, performance lectures, artistic interventions, participatory experiences and live role-playing games, often focusing on communities and audiences outside of conventional gallery or performance spaces. He has collaborated extensively with scientists and technologists, particularly in the social sciences. His other art-adjacent work is as a researcher, educator and activist in livelihoods, equity, sustainability and access for artists from marginalised groups, especially LGBTQ artists, disabled artists, self-taught artists and artists from low income backgrounds, like himself. alistairgentry.net

Anna Landre is a researcher at UCL’s Global Disability Innovation Hub, currently working on mapping and documenting disabled-led community groups, and she is also a disability activist.