"If I have overlooked something you hold precious—write it in the margin.” — Derek Jarman, Chroma, 1994
Visual AIDS is grateful to be the beneficiary of sales from the Blue Description Project tour t-shirt.
The Blue Description Project (BDP) is an audio description and captioning project, produced by artists and research assistant professors Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Robert Jones (Crip*) in collaboration with Sarah Hayden (Voices in the Gallery). Invested in a cripistemological (a portmanteau of ‘crip’ and ‘epistemological’) creative-critical framework where Disabled/Crip epistemologies function methodologically rather than as mere subject matter, the Blue Description Project engages Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility.
Jarman’s Blue is an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite being referred to as a feature film, Blue never existed exclusively in one medium. It was screened in theaters, simulcast on television and radio, released as a CD, and published as a book, creating opportunities for many different kinds of sensory abilities—visual, aural, and textual—to experience the work. The Blue Description Project builds on the multifaceted nature of Jarman’s work through newly commissioned and expansive accessibility. Reflecting Blue’s standing as a foundational work of Crip art, the project challenges ableist hierarchies while focusing on the generative possibilities of difference and interdependence.