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| Petra Coopers (Photo: Tamara Wade) |
Petra Kuppers, a large white queer disabled cisgender woman wearing yellow glasses, a shaved head, pink lipstick, and a black polka dot top, smiles to the sky, Open your arms and embrace the world. The handlebars of her mobility scooter are visible at the bottom of the image. She stood in front of a wall of colors: purple, pink, yellow and orange.
listen Petra Kuppers: How to do a limp drift
in my body and soul podcast here.
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| Becoming a fossil in Venice (Photo: Edward Smith) |
Petra opens her mouth, her collaborator and wife Stephanie Heit beside her, and a number of community participants all dancing under the lights become a fossil, a community dance film about the climate emergency and resilience. The screen shows a close-up of the fossilized coral’s changing color.
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| Crip Drip performance meditation in Venice (Photo: Edward Smith) |
Petra stood under the lights, eyes closed, as volunteers held bags of salt crystals to hand out to spectators as they lined up.
Petra Coopers (she/her) is a disability cultural activist and community performance artist. she
Grounded in a cultural approach to disability and using somatology, performance, media work and
Speculative writing aims to draw readers toward a more socially just and joyful future. In these
She’s been doing disability rafting during the pandemic year: working with humans and superhumans
Others are exploring interdependence, listening, being in the outdoors (or through dream journeys online)—
and complex joy.
Her latest academic research is Eco Soma: Pain and joy in speculative performance encounters
(University of Minnesota Press, 2022, Open Access). Her fourth collection of poetry, divers below
streetinvestigating true crime and ecological poetry at the soil level (Wayne State University
Press, February 2024). She teaches at the University of Michigan and is the 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
compatriots.
www.petrakuppers.com
HTtps://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814351116/diver-beneath-the-street/
https://www.upress.umn.edu/
