Wrong-sighted Conversations and Wrong-sighted Visits
Laura Arensburg /Transversal Aesthetics Immunity-Community
“Wrong-sighted Conversations” and “Wrong-sighted Visits” are two activities which form part of the project "Interdisciplinary Team for Wrong-sighted Testing" by Laura Arensburg, a selected artist in the Transversal Aesthetics Immunity - Community open call by Idensitat for hybrid residencies, with the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana and held at the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporánea de València. The activities are taking place in September and October 2022.

The conversations aim to create spaces specifically for people with special visual conditions, as well as to open a dialogue with professionals in ophthalmology in order to establish learning and experiential relationships outside the medical environment. In addition, the wrong-sighted visits extend an invitation to anyone who wishes to learn about, and to share the visually-impaireds’ experience of vision.

This mediation project explores unfocused, shifting, peripheral perspectives, bringing people with various visual conditions and ophthalmologists closer to each other. Through these meetings, we will test the conditions of visual impairment that we usually disregard; we will share knowledge and experience from a wide range of perspectives, and we will discover what emerges from this exploration, surrounded by the exhibitions of the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània.

Focusing on the visually impaired will allow us to question, from a position of inclusivity, the system in which we live, and to analyse the link between doctors and patients. There is a liberating game in the possibility of abandoning visual correction; we can convert vital experiences of our eyesight into fabulous images.
Then, we will meet face-to-face and virtually, to take off our glasses in order to perceive, to hallucinate and to reflect based upon how we see things, and to collectively inspire ourselves, based upon those other sensory powers and abilities. On this occasion, meetings will be held in the cultural institution (a space strongly linked to the visual by means of exhibitions and other oculocentric programmes), where experiences and spaces inhabited by visually-impaired people will be activated, as well as meetings with ophthalmologists and patients to dislocate that relationship, problematising scientific knowledge from an unfocused, intimate and horizontal perspective. In that blurred zone of poor eyesight, could less hierarchical connections exist? What might happen if, based on unfocused physical experience, “true” knowledge were to be placed in doubt? Could we imagine other social perspectives from these unfocused gazes?