Ieva Rosne, Latvian Centre of Contemporary Art, February 2023
Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts continues the focus on accessibility issues to ensure that the exhibition Decolonial Ecologies is accessible to as wide a range of visitors as possible, including people with different disabilities. Here is a brief report of what measures we made.
Accessibility for people with reduced mobility
The organisers faced several challenges to make the exhibition accessible to people with reduced mobility. The first challenge was the location of the exhibition space in the Old Town, whose medieval buildings and cobbled streets make it difficult for people with reduced mobility to move around and get to the exhibition space. An additional challenge was the fact that the exhibition took place during the winter months, when the pavements were covered with snow that was not always cleaned, creating additional obstacles for people with reduced mobility to reach the exhibition hall. Another challenge was that the exhibition hall is located in the basement of the building and during the exhibition due to technical obstacles the elevator was not working. Access to the exhibition hall for manual wheelchairs via the main entrance was provided by an electronic mobile lift. In order to ensure accessibility for all people with reduced mobility as well as for strollers, access to the exhibition was organised through the neighbouring, i.e. Riga City Council building, which is connected to the exhibition hall via an underground passage. A working group was set up to ensure accessibility, consisting of accessibility experts, representatives of the exhibition hall, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and Riga City Council. The working group went through several user experience pathways to ensure that visitors would have a positive experience of the exhibition. During this process, recommendations for accessibility improvements were made, resulting in the involvement of trained assistants, the reduction of bureaucratic obstacles and the posting of signs both at the exhibition hall and on the LCCA website. To make the exhibition more accessible, it was made possible also to visit the exhibition accompanied by specially trained mediators who ensured a tailor-made visit for each target group.
Accessibility of the exhibition for visually impaired people
People with visual impairments were provided with the possibility to receive descriptions of the works by e-mail and an audio guide. The exhibition was accessible to visitors with a guide dog. In order to make the video works accessible to people with hearing impairments, subtitles in Latvian and English were provided, as well as descriptions of the works.
Accessibility of the exhibition for people with mental disabilities
To make the content of the exhibition accessible to people with mental disabilities, descriptions of the works were made available in plain language, and guided tours of the exhibition were organised for this target audience as part of the workshop series “Inclusive Tuesdays”. The issues of inclusion raised in the Decolonial Ecologies exhibition at the LCCA are seen as an important and meaningful contribution to building an inclusive society, both by directly improving access to the environment for people with disabilities, and by raising awareness of the issues in the wider context and raising public awareness of the different groups at risk of social exclusion.
The public programme also discussed disability studies as a resource for building an inclusive society. It gathered academics, policymakers and people who work with people with disabilities in their daily lives. They were discussing how to build a more inclusive society, and raised questions both about how to make the environment more accessible to people with different types of disabilities and, more broadly, how to change perceptions about inclusive environments and societies where services and information are accessible to everyone. The recording of this conversation was published in the leading public broadcasting of Latvia LSM.
