COLLECTIVE READING with Sall Lam Toro #1
Care for reading about caring for artists? Explore how we can all care more for access needs, bids for care, and boundaries in artist care work.
14.11.25
14.11.25
15:00 - 17:00
THORAVEJ 29, KØBENHAVN NV
Participation in the event is FREE, but please reserve a ticket as seats are limited. You can book your ticket here:
The artistic practice
Over two evenings, multimedia perfomance artist body_hacker / SALL LAM TORO invite us to read and dive into passages from books that underpin their Care Rider Template: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice and Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant.
In each session, Sall will zoom in on embodied aspects of race, gender, class, economy and/or ability, which may come up in the room, while reading the texts. If the group allows for it, Sall will introduce separatist group work, so that matters of racialization, whiteness, and heteronormativity within care work can be addressed. Even if each evening is focused on reading, there will be space for discussion.
You are not required to have read the texts before, as you will be reading excerpts from the books together.
About the texts:
CARE WORK is written by longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. The essays explore the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.
HEALTH COMMUNISM is written by longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant. The book examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a so-called “surplus” class, which is regarded as a fiscal and social burden to society. The book argues that the value of human life cannot be based on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within capitalism.
As part of HAUT’s facilitation of soft and generous residencies, we have learned about artist care and Care Riders through Sall Lam Toro and credit them with developing a Care Rider Template, which we now use to invite all our visiting artists to elaborate upon their access needs, bids for care, and boundaries, while in residency.
The artist
Body_hacker (alias Sall Lam Toro)
Body_hacker (aka Sall Lam Toro) was born in Portugal and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, working with immersive multimedia performance art, orchestrating sensuous meetings, entanglements and rituals between the human and non-human.
They do so within the context of unnumbing and hacking bodies from everyday violent structures of modern capitalism and legacies of coloniality. This looks like involving the erotic, or, the sensuous (in an Audre Lorde type of way) as a way to confront alienation and illusions of separation in the modern living world between humans and non-humans. They also engage in community organizing around queer care work and autonomous living, and live and work collectively as part of queer housing and art collectives.
The reading experience
Collective Reading makes space for experiments with how we read, together.
We invite an artist or teacher to open up and play with the way we read: What happens when we read collectively, embodied or guided? Is it possible to find another way to read and engage with texts than we have previously done?