Calling Up Justice Communications Producer, Jesenia @NeuroSpicyNetworking, drove up to Seattle to join MouthWater Festival as their Production Manager. MouthWater Festival is a Disabled Arts Festival in Seattle, WA SEP 23 – OCT 13, 2024.
Video Report
Mouthwater Festival is three weeks of Disabled movement genius coming to Seattle. Disabled artists from all over the country will gather in town to share their work, develop their practice, foster cross-disability solidarity and grow their creativity. MouthWater Festival is the beginning of an arts hub by and centering Black and Indigenous Disabled artists to present, collaborate and get uplifted for their crafts. The festival’s values are anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, pro-Black, Disability Justice-informed, Afrofuturist, sex-educated and practical. The creatives and workers behind MouthWater dream of making more spaces for Disabled artistry to thrive. The MouthWater Festival will begin with artist incubating spaces like workshops, socials and photoshoots in late September 2024 then offer sliding scale performance-centered events during the first two weeks of October 2024. Calling Up Justice is joining them to present their work digitally in February of 2025.
MouthWater is a curated collaboration of disabled artists and the culmination of years of artistic vision from Saira Barbaric (they, he, she, ze). Saira is a nonbinary Black disabled hedonist fascinated by birth, death and rebirth. They are a maker of porn, performance art, costumes, paintings and events. Barbaric grounds their work in mediums and venues considered both high and low art with the aim at weakening the barrier between the two. After a BFA in costuming for theater, Barbaric worked in film and nightlife with an ongoing fixation on crafts and art objects. They are a co-founder of Scumtrust Productions, a nonbinary porn crew that crafts films and spaces exalting sensual magic and of Mouthwater Festival, a disabled dance project premiering in fall 2024.