Crip Affinity Group

Between 2024 and 2025, Crip Earth (Re)Generation has organized Crip Affinity Group (CAG), a monthly gathering with artists living with disability, chronic illness/pain at weder, a local community flower farm in Mariakerk (near Ghent, BE). Participating artists were selected after an open call by the research team. During the Crip Affinity Group, we experimented with seasonal agricultural activities (sowing, grafting, pruning). We embroidered a large collective cloth outdoors, ate together, and read crip theory in the flower field. We devised rituals and small practices of repair, shaped by our lived experiences of illness, disability, and/or chronic pain. Over time, Crip Affinity Group became a shared and shareable space of embodied knowledge about the reciprocity and brokenness of (eco)systems, the mutual dependence of humans and landscape, about toxic productivity, and about the shared vulnerability that connects us to one another and to the more-than-human. Participating artists were: Dolores Bouckaert, Winju Merve, Alici Giuliani, Giorgia Kokot, Florence Cheval, Ella De Mesmaeker, Carlien Foucaert & Saar Swinters, joined by members of the research team: Louis Vanhaverbeke, Tineke De Meyer, Peter Aers (in the second half of the cycle), Tumba Kiambi & Bauke Lievens. 

In October 2025, we closed the four seasons of Crip Affinity Group with a collective ritual at weder, to which every member of the affinity group brought a few invited guests. Every guest was asked to bring a piece of cloth, which was sown onto the already embroidered cloth of the affinity group. People were invited to reflect upon the past four seasons in their personal lives and articulate something they wanted to celebrate, let go of or grieve. We then asked them to find a natural material in the environment of the farm and sew it into the cloth, which we collectively stacked onto a circle of wooden poles – thus forming a circular shelter. In the middle of this circle we made a big fire, around which we drank a fiery drink and people could share what they had added to the cloth.