Jascha Blume

The room arrives three seconds late. Every room, every conversation, every joke. An interpreter translates, and I receive the world on a slight delay—a time zone of one, inside whatever space I happen to be standing in. I was born Deaf, in Amsterdam, in 1987. I have never known it any other way.

As a kid I attended two schools at once. Mainstream in the morning, Deaf school in the afternoon. Two languages, two social worlds, two sets of rules about how to get someone’s attention. I got good at the gap between them. The grey zone. That’s where most of my thinking still happens.

In 2005 I went to Gallaudet University in Washington, DC—the only Deaf university in the world. No interpreters. No lag. Everyone signs. Het was alsof het een grote familie is. For the first time, the room and I were in the same time zone.

Back in Amsterdam I studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. My thesis was about GIFs and sign language—how repetition in both changes the viewer’s experience of time. Hume wrote that repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind that contemplates it. That sentence felt like it had been written for me.

I draw in bic pen. No correction, no undo. Sign language works the same way: meaning lives in the body, in movement, in time. You can’t go back and fix a sign. You meant what your hands said.

In 2015, at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, I guided visitors through Ahmet Oğut’s Exploded City—part of the Vooruit! exposition. Scale models of buildings that no longer exist, shown intact. I did that tour every week for six months. Each time I thought: this is how I think. Whole structures, present and absent at the same time.

I also know the other image. Screaming inside a transparent plastic cube, one cubic decimetre — small enough to step over — lying on the street. Pedestrians walk past without noticing.

Sound is not absent for me. It is present differently—registered through surfaces, through vibration, through what I read in other people’s faces.

That same year I co-founded L’Altro Spazio in Bologna. A cocktail bar where eighty percent of the staff was disabled. Braille menus. Italian Sign Language training for the hearing staff. Dinners served in complete darkness. We fought for a wheelchair ramp in a heritage zone for ten years. We named a beer Ramp Pale Ale.

Crip Minds came from a simple recognition: disability expertise exists, and it is largely absent from mainstream cultural conversation. Not invisible—absent. There is a difference. Invisible means someone chose not to look. Absent means it was never invited into the room.

I built a publication that invites it in. Four voices, four angles. Not AI writing about disability. Disabled perspective, present daily, where it has been absent.

Signo ergo sum. I sign, therefore I exist.