Neurodiversity in Relation
An artistic intraethnographic process with Adam Wolfond and dis assembly: a neurodiverse arts collective, Artscape Youngplace
Estée Klar and Adam Wolfond are mother and son, artists and founders of dis assembly (fomerly The A Collective) in Toronto, which is collective for neurodiverse, relational-artistic creation and collaboration.
Adam Wolfond is a non-speaking, self- ascribed “man of autism” who types and moves to communicate. He is collaborating with Estée on this PhD dissertation and beyond. PhD: Neurodiversity in Relation: an artistic intraethnography.
Photo: Adam’s hand. “I am able to scatter/the way of the hand that likes/to see and I bring/the water to lucky life” - poem excerpt from Adam’s I Am Able To Scatter.
EVENTS
November 10, 2022
THE WANTING WAY
Book Launch, Exhibition, Panel Discussion on Neurodiverse Poetry, Movement and Art with Adam Wolfond, Estee Klar, Ellen Bleiwas adn Chris Martin. 7-9 p.m. TBD, Dis Assembly Studio, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Unit 109.
January 6, 2022
Modern Language Association Panel Neurodivergent Poetics
November 19, 2021
Panel for 10th Year Anniversary of Loving Lamposts, NYC.
October 31, 2021
Panel and Screening of S/Pace with Estee Klar and Adam Wolfond in Rendez-Vous with Madness Festival
Workman Arts: Autistic Reels: Reclaiming Our Stories
WATCH
Four Neurodivergent Poets Reinvent Language
2020
December 9, 2020 (1:00 pm)
The Brooklyn Rail: Poetry Reading with Adam Wolfond, Chris Martin, Hannan Emerson, Lauren Russell, Farid Matuk.
October 7- November 11, 2020 (Resumes in January 2021, tbd).
The A Collective Reading Group reads Fernand Deligny's The Arachnean and Other Texts with neurodiverse participants.
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October 3 - December 3, 2019
Exhibition S/Pace: a film installation, screening and poetry/stick installation.
Critical Distance Centre for Curators
Exhibition runs through the fall on the 3rd Floor of Artscape Youngplace (180 Shaw St., Toronto)
“It is the act of creation that becomes the oeuvre, the work in progress, like life itself. It is in the act that the poetic will be revived”
PUBLICATIONS
The Wanting Way, Adam Wolfond, 2022.
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In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to “extend the choreography.”
In fact, his entire thrust is out and toward. Each poem moves out along its own underutilized pathway, awakening unseen dimensions for the reader like a wooded night walk suddenly lit by fireflies. And as each path elaborates itself, Wolfond’s guiding hand seems always to stay held out to the reader, inviting them further into a shared and unprecedented unfolding.
The Wanting Way is actually a confluence of diverse ways—rallies, paths, waves, jams, streams, desire lines—that converge wherever the dry verbiage of the talking world requires hydration. Each poem is an invitation to bathe in the play of languaging. And each poem is an invitation to a dance that’s already happening, called into motion by the objects and atmospheres of a more-than-human world. Wolfond makes space for new poetics, new choreographies, and new possibilities toward forging a consensual—felt and feeling—world where we might find free disassembly and assembly together.
There is a neurodivergent universe within this one, and Wolfond’s poems continuously pull back the unnecessary veil between human and nature.
Keywords:
Toronto; water; autism; neurodiversity; neurodivergent; disability; ecology; architexture; relation; nonspeaking
In Way of Music Water Answers Toward Questions Other Than What Is Autism. Chapbook of Poetry by Adam Wolfond.
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