Quilted fabrics in pink, orange, yellow, green, and black are scattered around a white room. To the right and left of the room, the fabrics are suspended in the air by straps. In the center of the room, the fabrics have been placed on the floor. At the far end of the room, a black sign displays PITIDOS DE AUDIFONOS in white letters.
Hac Vinent Accident, exhibition view, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2024.
Photo: Roberto Ruiz, courtesy of the artist & ADN Galeria, Barcelona

Hac Vinent’s Disca and Cuir Meshes

Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández
117 – Crip Feature Hac Vinent
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Hac Vinent’s work is much indebted to their experience as a Catalan and cuir person who became deaf after a serious health problem when they were a baby. Due to their entourage’s lack of knowledge about Deaf culture, as well as an absence of interpreters in the ableist-oralist world in 1990s Spain, Vinent did not learn sign language; they had to learn lip-reading and use “non-biological devices” (their term for hearing aids and subtitles) to communicate.1 1 - Carolina Ciuti, “entrevista: Hac Vinent, artista anticapacitista, sondeando los límites de lo sensorial,” Exibart (website), December 20, 2024, accessible online, (author’s translation). They later ended their studies in sociology and moved into the more manual and independent realm of fine arts.

At the intersection of all these forces, needs, and restrictions, and in contrast to Deaf artists who reject the categorization of Deaf people as disabled individuals, Vinent has developed a multimodal and experimental sculptural and video practice. With materials encompassing text, fabrics, plaster, and visual content taken from various media, they address bodies with functional diversity and respond to social essentialisms used for deploying or securing binary notions of gender and disability, and for legitimizing relations of inequality.

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This article also appears in the issue 117 - Crip
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