Inari Sandell’s Butterfly Logic is the second project presented in Espai 13’s We Will Keep Each Other Company When It Grows Dark exhibition series.
Sandell works in a variety of media, including photography, video, and sculpture. Their research is frequently based on experiences lived from neurodivergent and queer positions, while questioning the different conventional limits established in relation to bodily and cognitive capacities. These themes appear repeatedly in their work mainly as methods for unlearning ableism and advancing towards a more sustainable and accessible artistic practice.
In their project for Espai 13, Sandell explores some of the discourses and strategies of the psychiatric disciplinary system that have defined standard accounts of neurodiversity, and especially of autism spectrum disorder. These repressive methods are often aimed at reinforcing the dominant system to ensure that everything works. The control, internment, repression, and medication of disruptive agents are at the basis of this regulatory system. Accordingly, discipline and sanctions are intended to preserve what the capitalist system regards as a person’s most valuable attributes: their capacity to produce and consume. In response to these structures and discourses surrounding neurodiversity, Sandell proposes an unexpected signifier to convey an idea of resistance: the butterfly.
