Room 1 in the Emilio Caraffa Provincial Fine Arts Museum in Córdoba, Argentina is the first exhibition space in the country to be completely accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. Through audio descriptions, blind people can enjoy an aesthetic experience that is similar to that of a person without visual disability. The gallery exhibits 26 works by women in the exhibition Narrar historias con fragmentos [Telling stories through fragments], in the Visualmente incorrectas [Visually incorrect] cycle of the Caraffa’s permanent collection, the large part of which had not been previously shown.
The exhibition explores the artists’ link to writing, with its works arranged on one baseline, representing a line in a notebook. A guided circuit indicated on the floor indicates the exact place to stand in front of each work in order to scan a QR code and listen to audio descriptions created by a multidisciplinary research team of 32 people. Although other Argentinian cultural centers, such as the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, have some audio-described works in their permanent exhibitions and technical descriptions on their websites, the Caraffa’s is a unique experience.
Jimena López, who has been blind since she was three years old due to a hospital-acquired virus, is an activist for the rights of people with disabilities and works at the School of Communication Sciences at the National University of Córdoba (UNC). She was the one who first raised the issue of accessibility that the project addresses. “It’s about thinking and creating barrier-free spaces so that all people, regardless of our particular situation, can move around and participate in social and cultural exchanges,” she says.
Marta Pereya, a PhD in new communicative languages and the director of the museum project at the UNCA, says that they started with the audio description of short films and then studied ways of translating the visual language of works of art into audio — including words, effects and music — and creating a mediation tool that offered a sensorial experience to people with visual disabilities.
The initiative was financed by the UNC’s Secretary of Science and Technology and is endorsed by the university’s Secretary of Extension. Roxana Singer, UNC academic advisor and coordinator of the youth group Friends of the Caraffa Museum, brought the idea to the museum, which opened in 1916 and houses the art collections of Córdoba province. This marked the beginning of a partnership between state institutions, which was later joined by the Julián Baquero Educational Resource Center for People With Disabilities. “We found the proposal very interesting, because the museum is a public space that seeks to take into account the diversity of the people who inhabit it and give it meaning,” says Mariana del Val, director of the Caraffa.
“We didn’t want an audio guide; we wanted people who are blind to have the same experience in front of the painting as those who can see. It was extremely ambitious and difficult, because how do you describe something as complex as abstract art to someone?,” del Val continues. But, she points out, even figurative works, which are a priori easier to describe, are also seen through the diversity of individual perception.
“Who does interpretation belong to? To the artists who made the work? To us? Does it belong to those who we think of as potential listeners?,” asks Jimena Castillo, co-director of the initiative. For the project, eight interdisciplinary groups were formed from experts and people who are blind or have low vision, and each was assigned a grouping of works. The first step was agreeing on a description of each work collaboratively from various perspectives, following a participatory methodology of scientific investigation.
The ensuing debates explored questions about claims to objectivity, poetic evaluation and aesthetic intention of the work, as well as the translation of two different semiotic systems and the transposition of codes based on the way people who are blind evoke words and recover images from their individual and cultural memory when they receive a sound stimulus. Visual artist Luciana Yorlano said that the work was enriching..
“We as artists want to convey a sensation rather than a pure, objective image. In the conversations we had, they would say to me, ‘You’re describing things we don’t see.’ And in contrast, I would say, ‘How can I objectively convey this feeling?,” she says.
In the case of abstract art, they decided to work with analogies. One of the works was described as a fish scale, for example. “We asked ourselves, if touch is a way of translating semiotics, how we could translate touch into a verbal figure,” says Castillo.
For the participants, this was a thought-provoking experience. Pereyra points out that one of the prejudices they faced was talking about color to people who cannot see. “This has to do with a deep-rooted cultural issue regarding disability. People are afraid of hurting others because they believe that people with disabilities are suffering from a tragedy,” she says.
One of the questions was how colors could be perceived. López says, “Color is a cultural construction. We have an awareness of color from our understanding of it, its distinct meanings, feelings, associations.” Red can refer to passion, strength or heat, for example.
Castillo recalls how López clearly illustrated this during a panel discussion: “I may not see the color gray, but I know what a gray day is.” Castillo points out that this explains why people with disabilities were involved in the final evaluation of the project. “You can’t correct a verbal script without taking into account how a blind person is constructing it visually,” she says.
Nancy García, an art professor at the Julián Baquero school who has reduced vision due to myopic maculopathy, says that audio description allows her to vividly imagine a painting. “When we heard the first audio, I said to Marta, ‘Give me a piece of paper and pencil and I’ll draw what I’m hearing,’” she remembers.
Having opened in December 2024, the guided visit through Room 1 features 10 audios, an introduction and a closing segment, and eight descriptions of groupings of works, which can be heard autonomously.
Right to culture
Project participants say that audio descriptions are just a grain of sand in the fight for the visibilization of rights for people with disabilities. López thinks that a conception of disability as seen through the “ideology of normality” persists, drawing a line between able bodies and those that lie outside its norms. She says that the 2006 International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities establishes that disability is a concept that evolves and is built by interaction between people and contexts.
“Accessibility is an intersectional issue. It is essential for a particular group of people, but it enriches everyone’s experience,” says López. True to her words, Caraffa staff have observed that audio descriptions are used by all kinds of people and note that the exhibition has been visited by people who have never set foot in a museum before.
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