The Dashing Cripmobile
Isa Hukka
for Everyday Priorities publication, November 2026
The starting point for the limping, dashing moves of this text, are two performances I witnessed as part of the Everyday Priorities — Art, Technology and Accommodations programme.
Everyday Priorities, created and curated by M-Cult (Helsinki, Finland) and Metro54 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) is a contemporary arts project, looking at the relationship between access, technology, and bodies.
The two performances were presented in November 2025 at the Kanneltalo Cultural Centre in Helsinki. The first piece was Unansible by Flis Holland, a Helsinki-based artist. It was followed by an installation Untitled [
In my crippled reality, being able to show up at an event is never a given. For this petrol-stained reflection text, I’ve started noticing what assisted me in experiencing the performances. I apply crip2 ideas of what an assistive device could be. I find myself testing out two assistive devices: the concrete vehicle that carried me to see the performances, and a crip literary device I call the Dasher.
The Dasher3 is a concept I am translating and developing, referring to the Finnish term “pinkoja” that was created by our Just Another Crip Group collective in 2020. The Finnish verb pinkoa means to dash, sprint, or scamper; Pinkoja refers to someone who dashes.
The Dasher is a force of nature, endlessly racing forward at a dizzying speed.
The Dasher, the epitome of Health, exerts itself for Efficiency, Success, and Growth. Sprinting its linear timeline, the Dasher wins the race. Flawlessness — Clarity — Coherence. I live in a society organized around the standards, ideals, and measurements of the Dasher. Truth value 1 or 0. Point of view: Universal. The Dasher masters objective compartments, classifications, and taxonomical ranking. Definition — Analysis — Explanation. This perpetual motion machine hastes onward, forgetting all about the Crip limping far behind
— and sometimes to dash — may be your only chance.
The Dasher is not one but many. It is not out there but right here.
I The Automobile
I start the engine and the dashboard lights up. The distinct hum of the motor releases my shoulders. I smell petrol mixed with hard plastic.
I call this car the Cripmobile.4
The Cripmobile is an approximately 15-year old station wagon, bought used by my father. For years, it served its purpose as a nuclear family car with lots of room in the trunk. Little did I know it’d end up in the hands of artists figuring out what family looks like in a queer crip reality.
Today, the Cripmobile is not only a world, resource, assistive device of mine. At least when it’s not at the repair shop, it’s a shared possibility. To help pets travel, get to a doctor’s appointment, go find cheap materials for art. To carry some of the weight.
My aching body dashes through Helsinki, 80 km an hour, black steel glimmering against the dark night. It’s November 2025, and I’m on my way to an evening of two performances.
II The Literal Understanding
Unansible is a performance by Flis Holland, an artist with a Master’s in Aerospace Engineering & Astronautics. The starting point of the work is the sci-fi concept of the ansible — playing with the word answearable — coined by author Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Ansible network offers instantaneous interstellar communication. No delays. No static. Seamless exchanges, said to dissolve the distances between us and foster understanding.6
Holland steps onto the stage in Kanneltalo, attempting to get a hold of artist Shubhangi Singh through the ansible network. Time passes sideways as the connection does not perform as expected. There is a strangeness in listening to their intergalactic phone call. I feel like Singh is kind of here in space, kind of somewhere far away. Instead of seamless connection, the call starts to confuse, lag, fail. The delay and glitch is supported by composer Juuli Haverinen’s subtle sound design.
Part of Holland’s practice in the context of neurodivergence, is taking things literally as a starting point. Too many autistic people are excluded and mocked for this type of literal understanding. Taking the concept of ansible more literally, Holland builds a simulation of the ansible network onstage to be experienced and tested out.
Based on the Unansible, I interpret the concept of the ansible — perfect connection across galactic distances — as capturing the Dasher's fiction of flawlessness. The piece questions this dashing fantasy: “Yet the signal, for all its perfection, feels alien.”7 However, as Holland describes, the ansible is not categorized as simply utopian or dystopian. There is more to the story, as communication has different meanings and forms for each of us.
When focusing on the frictions of the ansible network, the piece questions the demand for all bodies and temporalities to conform. Holland tells me they work with the question of what is lost if we design the world for a standardized body and time. This brings me to one textual ingredient of the performance. We are presented with snippets of NASA’s image descriptions, made for the images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.8
The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks, and valleys — an appearance very similar to a mountain range. Three long diffraction spikes from the top right edge of the image suggest the presence of a large star just out of view.
Applying descriptions by NASA as poetic material, the performance suggests alternative ways of relating to space, time, and embodiment. Pausing to listen to the descriptions, I feel they could be outlining either outer space or the corners of my body. What’s the difference really? I question what I assume is far or near, what is big or small.
I consider who usually gets to access the information shared by space technologies — information often touching enormous questions, like what the role or future of humans is in the universe. Who’s invited to discuss them? The visual descriptions also offer creativity in examining the universe without relying on the cultural scripts of understanding space through sight (“stargazing”, telescopes, etc.). Instead of a narrow ideal of a flawless ansible connection, Holland’s performance proposes a more expansive vision of communication.
Therefore, the Unansible takes part in diversifying, perhaps cripping,10 communication. The performance plays with what is often deemed failed communication. The piece rewrites the flawless fiction of the Dasher by revealing the imperfection of the ansible network.
Holland explores a neurodivergent perspective on technology and efficiency, which makes me think of the current debates around AI technologies. What would another starting point for technology look like? What if technology were used to diversify communication, instead of unifying it?
I wonder if creating access is a wavering walk, instead of a race to the finish line. What would it mean to let access grow out of the attempts, the failures? What would happen if a lag or disconnection were actually seen as a creative chance to connect?
III The Cripmobile
During the intermission, I leave my seat.
In the freezing November darkness, I limp, I stumble, I fall. I get back up again. I walk today’s maximum, a couple hundred meters to the car. Volkswagen Passat.
I’ve found out that the first ancestor variant of the Passat was called the Volkswagen Dasher. 11
The Passat, the Dasher, the Cripmobile sits there at a free parking spot, quiet.
Only because of the dashing Cripmobile, I am able to attend these performances at the other side of the city. My chest feels hollow for having to just leave it there.
I grab my meds and do my best to make it back on time.
IV The Olfactory Description
I lean onto a foldable chair in the Kanneltalo theatre hall. Waiting for the piece to begin, I wonder:
When experiencing a performance,
What does a crip body do?
Where does it go? If I am this body, where do I go?
What am I expected to do? How do I choose to relate? Do I choose to obey?
Joy Mariama Smith’s Untitled [
In our own time, we are invited to approach and smell several objects displayed in the middle of the theatre hall. Scented objects, such as soaps, organic materials, memorabilia, shoes, and a doll, are placed on top of several podiums.
A part of the installation is a looping video work, with Smith’s DJ-mix playing in the background while a mass of colourful text streams through the screen like a waterfall. The AI-generated text, gathered with Smith’s collaborators, is a collection of olfactory descriptions.12 Depicting different scents, the olfactory descriptions are creative and detailed, presented in multiple languages. Drafting notes for this text, I am surprised by how hard it is to put a scent into words. I notice that relying on my sense of smell is something I take for granted.
I move around slowly, grabbing an object, one by one, carefully smelling them. I am caught off guard by the sharp, damp, poignant odors. There is so much nuance. Some scents resemble herbs, or wet soil, some are pungent manufactured perfumes. I make up stories about the meanings and histories the objects may carry. Where did these shoes, or this doll come from — where do they belong? I keep sniffing and imagining.
Watching other audience members react to the scents suddenly brings tears to my eyes. I witness people’s expressions and body language, sincere and immediate. My jaw drops slightly, out of fascination with how intimate this feels.
Why do some of the scents feel familiar, some strange to me? Why do some feel inviting and some invasive?
After a while, my head spins. Overwhelm. I step outside with a colleague, also sensitive to smells. Fragrance-freedom strives to protect people with fragrance sensitivity, and it is often considered a standard in public spaces in Finland today. I’ve adopted it as a baseline when doing access work. Educating myself on the topic in recent years, I found the perspectives presented in the framework of Disability Justice13 crucial. Disability Justice organizers have advocated for access and solidarity for survivors of chemical and environmental injury, for example through educating and creating “low or no fragrance zones”.14 As we discuss these perspectives, Smith adds to the conversation that they see a difference between using synthetic and natural scents, which are both present in this installation.
While I breathe outside the venue, something about my baseline doesn’t smell right. What does the freedom from fragrance really mean? As each and every scent of Smith’s installation opens up a whole new direction — the freedom to imagine intimacies, histories, cultures — what does it mean to exclude certain scents from public spaces?
Discussing with Smith, we touch on the racist histories and current tendencies of policing smells. Who is considered having a “strong” scent, and who gets to define this? With what authority? The installation definitely uncovered the scent cop in me.
By questioning the hierarchy of senses, as Smith puts it, the piece offers unconventional ways of coming together to sense. I find this a meaningful critique in a culture dominated by the Dasher — a character of Normalcy, an assumption to perceive the world “perfectly” through five senses. The Dasher casts aside those who cannot sense as expected. The Dasher polices scents it has racialized as Other, classified as “too strong”.
Through suggesting the olfactory descriptions, Smith has created a space where people with anosmia are recognized and included in sensing a work of art. The installation demands access to sensing for all, calling for justice from this perspective.
The Untitled [
V The Self Deception
It’s been months since the evening of two performances. I’ve neither been driving for a while nor working on this reflection text featuring the beloved Cripmobile. I find myself sitting in the driver’s seat, staring at the W-logo on the steering wheel.
I start the engine and the dashboard lights up. The distinct hum of the motor stiffens my shoulders. The most familiar scent — petrol mixed with hard plastic — now feels like from another galaxy.
Volkswagen is one of the most common cars you see in Finland every day. Its history is rarely brought up. The company was created in Nazi Germany to manufacture “the people’s car”, as it was called in the state’s propaganda. The Volkswagen factory produced weapons and military vehicles for the army of the Third Reich, relying on forced labour during the Second World War.15
In her article, historian Natalie Scholz presents a postcolonial critique, tracing the cultural narratives and hidden meanings of the Volkswagen in Germany. She writes that after war
The Volkswagen, this mass-produced material object, was the vehicle in which millions of postwar Germans imagined driving away from their past. But they were also driving “debris” from the Nazi empire.16
I’m unable to drive anywhere. Recently, I found out about Volkswagen’s future vision for one of its German factories.17
Volkswagen may sell Osnabrück, its former car factory. The buyer would be a partnership — the Israel-based investor group Aurelius Capital and the state of Lower Saxony — planning to cooperate with the Israeli Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.18 They discuss establishing a center for “security and defense solutions” at the Osnabrück site.19 The Israeli company Rafael20 advertises its “decades of combat-proven experience and expertise". 21
The stink of petrol washes over me as the effective device of my mind starts operating.
Self-deception.
Security and defense solutions. Combat-proven expertise.
Genocide against the Palestinian people.
I witness myself come up with all the justifications.
“But I started driving this car LONG BEFORE I learned about Volkswagen’s plans… I mean it’s such a common car in Finland, I can’t change all of this alone… I can’t afford a different car right now… I need this for my independence…”
While I empathize with my day-to-day practicalities, they don’t change the new reality I am in.
The Cripmobile once again gives me a lesson on interdependence,22 the fact of life that we are fundamentally interconnected with all living beings, histories, and systems inside and around us. In front of me, unravels the myth of independence23 — one of the many cultural narratives surrounding disability and vulnerability.
With a flood of shame, guilt, and a sense of internal conflict, I find myself thinking of writer and educator Mia Mingus’ critique on the myth of independence. Mingus asks:
“Whose oppression and exploitation must exist for your ‘independence?’”.24
VI The Dashing Crip
Holland’s Unansible performance rewrites the flawless fiction of the Dasher. The work takes part in cripping communication through proposing a more literal understanding of the ansible network. The intergalactic piece suggests diversifying relationships to time, space, and communication.
Smith’s Untitled [
Both works challenge the widespread assumptions of the Dasher. The pieces follow a creative logic of their own, by owning and experimenting with access tools, such as descriptions. They resist seeing vulnerability as a monolith, or access to art and community as a standardized checklist. I link the pieces to the traditions of crip art where access is not instrumental, but a living relation and a comprehensive process.
In November 2025, after the Everyday Priorities event, I am driving some people home from the Kanneltalo Cultural Centre. While my colleagues get some rest in the car, I am able to drive us home, since their company alleviates the symptoms I’m having. An everyday moment of access.
After dropping the colleagues off, I think about the roads to access that opened up tonight. I contemplate why it makes a difference, and the many reasons why nights like this are too rare.
In the past, experiencing more accessible art events in my home city evoked in me not just ease but also an intense turmoil. I have felt helpless because creating access seems to be an exception, not an everyday priority. So I would regress to my culturally reinforced mechanisms of avoidance.25 Following the Finnish social code, I would withdraw, isolate, circle around but never address. Then attack: blame it all on the Dasher.
I’ve used the Crip/Dasher division to keep others away. When I’ve felt misunderstood and excluded, it’s been easy to blame the Dasher. I’ve fortified categories: they could never understand, they live somewhere out there far away in a “Land of the Abled Privilege”. To distance myself, I have led myself into believing that ableism was only hurting us, not them.
Tonight, I know:
overlapping and alternating, the Crip and the Dasher, live inside me. I am a crippled Dasher, a dashing Crip. I catch myself thinking I would not dash — just because I cannot sprint.
Knowing this in my system, I choose not to drive away, but towards.
A note on the writing process
I worked on this text over the course of a year during which my thoughts have developed a lot. I have consulted colleagues and mentors. Technology and access being the theme of the publication, I have also used feedback from a large language model tool (Claude by Anthropic) on the structure, clarity, wording, and grammar of a few of the drafts. The text does not contain language model generated sentences, and it is reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by me.
I’m not sure I’d use a large language model in the future, knowing what I know now. However I am grateful for this learning process, as it led me to examine my values as a writer, the undeniable ethical pitfalls of AI, and the shared ethical guidelines. I have been inspired by e.g. “AI – Best practices for authors” by the Author’s Guild and “Using AI tools in your writing” by Wiley. I welcome discussion and feedback on this topic.
It is prohibited to use this text or parts of it in training AI or large language models.
Thank you
Thank
My project on crip writing (rampakirjoitus) is generously supported with a grant from the Kone Foundation.I have worked on this text in the Mustarinda international residency in May 2026, in Kainuu region, Northern Finland. Thank you Juti and everybody for your support, shared food, and company.
My work with the concepts of the Dasher and the Crip is inspired by the local Finnish- and Swedish-speaking collective work we did with Just Another Crip Group. I thank the co-founders Nadja Leham, Milla Tengström, and Emmy Karhu.
Thank you Flis Holland and Joy Mariama Smith for being in conversation about your pieces.
Thank you for feedback J. Saloheimo, Juti Saari, and Zipora Ogola.
Thank you Marja Väänänen for mentoring and feedback.
Thank you Salla Aldrin Salskov for guidance and for our collaboration over the years.
Thank you to friends and family for insightful discussions, and taking care of the Cripmobile.
The text contains excerpts from my essay “Fyra iakttagelser om krymplingstid” (eng. Four observations on crip time), published in Swedish by Ny Tid magazine in 8/2025.
The Dashing Cripmobile, a contribution by Isa Hukka, forms part of the essay series which concludes this iteration of Everyday Priorities – Art, Technology and Accommodations. This text reflects on performances in our recent event series in November 2025, presented at the Kanneltalo Cultural Centre in Helsinki. The first performance was Unansible by Flis Holland, a Helsinki-based artist. It was followed by an installation Untitled [
Hukka writes: ‘In my crippled reality, being able to show up at an event is never a given. For this petrol-stained reflection text, I’ve started noticing what assisted me in experiencing the performances. I apply crip ideas of what an assistive device could be. I find myself testing out two assistive devices: the concrete vehicle that carried me to see the performances, and a crip literary device I call the Dasher.’
Everyday Priorities – Art, Technology and Accommodations is created and curated by Metro54 and M-Cult. The project commissioned works by artists Flis Holland and Joy Mariama Smith and was organised in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux and supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Finland and the Mondriaan Fonds, Netherlands.
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Isa Hukka (Helsinki, FIN) writes poetry, essays, performances, and translation. Hukka facilitates workshops, trainings, panel discussions, and projects. Hukka has studied and taught philosophy which means an applied practice of reflection and dialogue. They have collaborated with dozens of cultural institutions such as publications, festivals, universities, theatre groups, and NGOs in Finland and abroad. Hukka’s works have received recognition such as the national Theatre Act of the Year award in 2023, and Vuoden tiedekynä 2026 nomination for distinguished academic writing. In their body of work, Hukka has critically explored topics such as identity, myths, agency, and the idea of safer spaces.
With Helsinki based Art & Media Culture Agency M-Cult and Amsterdam Metro54, a space for Contemporary Culture, I publicly acknowledge that the State of Finland is founded on the lands of the Sámi people, the Finnish people, and many others. We pay our respects to the Sámi people as the indigenous inhabitants of the Sápmi area, and recognise their rights as an indigenous people. We recognise and respect their sovereignty, their culture, their custodianship, and their continuing contribution to the life of this state. We welcome feedback about the phrasing of this statement.
1 The evening of performances took place on 26 November 2025, as part of the Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival.
2 The word crip is derived from the derogatory term “cripple”. I use it here as a redefined and reclaimed term, taken back by some people in (queer) disabled cultures. I have participated in developing a related Finnish disability political term, “rampa”. These terms are contested; please see for example Eli Clare’s book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, 2015 [1999].
3 Our local autonomous disability cultural group, Just Another Crip Group, was founded by Nadja Leham, Milla Tengström, Emmy Karhu, and me in 2020 in Helsinki. Pinkoja-term was born out of the need to translate and create vocabulary for our local crip realities in the cultural and linguistic contexts of Finnish and Finland Swedish. To me, discussing “the culture of the Dasher” is also a way of avoiding commenting on anyone’s body or ability, which I see as an issue with expressions such as “(temporarily) able-bodied”. I have also suggested a translation of Pinkoja into Swedish – “rusare”, the dasher or rusher – for which I thank Mio Lindman and Salla Aldrin Salskov for collaboration.
4 In Finnish: Rampamobiili.
5 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in the context of Disability Justice that “Crip emotional intelligence… [...] is understanding that beds are worlds. Houses are worlds. Cars are worlds”, p. 71-72 in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, 2018, Arsenal Pulp Press.
6 Direct quote from the communication materials of the Unansible -performance, 2025, balticcircle.fi.
7 Direct quote from the communication materials of the Unansible performance, 2025, balticcircle.fi.
8 “Webb’s first images”, NASA’s website. Released in July 2022.
9 NASA’s James Webb Telescope Photostream on Flickr.
10 Cripping is a much discussed disability cultural and political practice. To crip (something), is a verb, a process of actively doing things differently, for example by turning around assumptions of ability or normalcy. I refer particularly to the local understanding of “rampauttaminen” that I have developed in Finnish, for example in an award-nominated article about cripping the safe(r) space: Isa Hukka: “Turvallista tilaa rampauttamassa”, 2026. SQS — Suomen Queer-Tutkimuksen Seuran Lehti, 19(1-2), 34-53. https://doi.org/10.23980/sqs.178000
11 The Dasher was the name used in North America. For more, please see for example Jim Donnelly: “On Dasher: Remembering an underappreciated Volkswagen”, in Jim Donnelly On Wheels, 24. April 2020.
12 Olfactory — from Latin, “to olfacere = to smell”, source: Merriam-Webster online dictionary. In the communication materials of the installation, Smith invites the audience to use the olfactory as a lens (2025, balticcircle.fi). This is why I propose that the descriptions of scents could be called “olfactory description”, similarly to “visual description”.
13 Disability Justice is an intersectional and anti-capitalist framework challenging the single-issue approach of the disability rights movement. It is “a term coined by the Black, brown, queer, and trans members of the original Disability Justice Collective, founded in 2005 by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, Leroy Moore, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret”, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in the preface of their book Care Work, p. 15. Please see more for example on Sins Invalid’s website.
14 Sources: Sins Invalid: Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People, 2019, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: “Fragrance free femme of color genius”.
15 Natalie Scholz: “Ghosts and Miracles: The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris in Postwar West”, p. 489. In Comparative Studies in Society and History, JULY 2020, Vol. 62, No. 3 (JULY 2020), pp. 487-519
16 Ibid., p. 493.
17 Reuters: “Volkswagen in talks over making air defence components at Osnabrueck plant, FT says”, on Reuters.com, 24 March 2026.
18 Seth J. Frantzman: “Rafael, Lower Saxony and Aurelius to develop Volkswagen site in Germany”, on Breakingdefense.com, 07 September 2026, and Volkswagen Group: “Setting the course for the future of the Osnabrück site”, 07 September 2026.
19 Rafael: “Rafael reaches initial agreement with German authorities & Aurelius on Osnaburck factory”, 07 September 2026.
20 The same company created the David’s Sling, an air and missile system Finland purchased for more than 300 million EUR in 2023. Overall, the Finnish state has recently strengthened what they call defence partnership with Israel, source: Yle News / Yle.fi: “Finland quietly extends defence partnership with Israel”, 31 August 2026.
21 Source: the website of the Rafael company.
22 I have originally learned this concept from Mia Mingus’ writing in the framework of Disability Justice.
23 Mingus’s term.
24 Mia Mingus: “Interdependence (excerpts from several talks)”, published on 22 January 2010, Leaving Evidence -blog.
25 “Mechanisms of avoidance” (in Finnish: välttelymekanismit) is psychotherapist and mentor Marja Väänänen’s term.