Relationshapes are affective movement drawings. Also cartographies of contrapuntal movement, these drawings reflect how space and relation affect the way we move. This is not directed movement, not coerced or choreographed. This is simply attunement to how we move and a way to think about how support is always mobile and undulating. I also drew the affect, however, of movement that was directed from therapists and schools.
These drawings emerged as the the non-written contribution to rethinking how we tend to engage with autistic people. I was attentive to the professional team meetings; where the therapists dictate strategies within the pathology paradigm. Also, where there is a team leader on a typical autism team or in a school meeting, the hierarchy is felt. The way we must engage with the autistic person in the clinical sense, becomes a prescription and a strategy as opposed to a mutual collaboration. The autistic is the object toward which these methodologies are enacted. The way curriculum and classrooms are run are also directing hierarchical “bank-deposit” education.
Fernand Deligny’s work (1913-1996) resembles this; where he mapped the movements of autistics at his commune in Cevennes, France. Deligny did not aim to rehabilitate the autistic. This collaboration with Adam extends Deligny’s work in that Adam contributes to the way he feels and the way he wants to collaborate and also, participate in his own education. Drawing affective movement was a way for me to think of collaboration as mutual and also, to think about how movement cues movement.
I am a lot of the time thinking about how to move. I want the art to have a feeling of the boy’s assembling of the really tough movement. I want good art about movement to give people the ideas of the way I don’t always answer in words. I think that people ask questions to assembled ideas that always please them and they hope sometimes that their questions are backed by my typing. My art opens understandings of autism that feels relations with good people and my environment. Activating movement for me is because of the support the body has feeling with another body. I want art about movement to give people ideas about the way I don’t answer in words. Can a good body feel without another body? (Adam, 2016).
