Accessibility and Inclusion in Art Spaces: How to realize the utopia?

Abstract

Under a range of national and international laws, the right to access the medium is starting to be recognized since both World Wars and the proclamation of the Normalization Principle in the sixties. Despite the decades elapsed, the collective imagination continues reducing it to physical and sensory accessibility and ignores other essential aspects, only considered among specialist.

At the same time, institutional interventions promote changes in the physical medium or in the channels of communication, but ignore fundamental questions -like conceptual accessibility- particularly significant in cultural contexts. The situation is exacerbated in spaces dedicated to art, where the world of meanings (that make us humans) takes special relevance. The circle is closed by a lack of a body of knowledge about the question, the bibliographic dispersion and the meagre attention that specialist literature gives to cognitive barriers.

This article presents a wider conception of barriers that take part in exclusion. It addresses conceptualaccessibility and proposes a basic model for future interventions that can capture coherently the differentaspects that affect inclusion in art spaces.