Tactile Beauty: Experience Arts Beyond Sight

Camions, Fantômes de la liberté, an audiowalking tour of the National Arts Centre (NAC).

The challenge: create an offering around Mélanie Binette’s Camions, Fantômes de la liberté (Trucks [Phantoms of Liberty]) accessible to francophone Blind and Low Vision audiences.

Stemming from the events of the 2022 trucker protests known as the “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa, Mélanie Binette invited the public on an audio performance unfolding throughout the public spaces of the National Arts Centre. The journey culminated in a view of Parliament Hill, the site of the truckers’ protests, from the Rossy pavilion, one of the NAC’s glass-walled spaces.

The Tactile Version

The resulting tactile tour introduced Blind and Low Vision (BLV) francophone participants to the National Arts Centre’s architecture, its public art, and to Camions’ site-specific scenography.

By offering a miniaturized route of a journey spanning the indoor and outdoor spaces of the three-level building, it also allowed access to audiences with reduced mobility. The entire experience therefore took place within a studio located near the Camions (Trucks) meeting point, the so-called “Departure garage.”

Samples of architectural materials were placed on various tactile stations, including concrete with granite pebbles, lightweight fiberglass, polished limestone, and red carpet typical of formal events.

The NAC’s public art was illustrated by a miniature birch bark canoe, and a felt reproduction of a sample from a tapestry. Miniatures of site-specific installations included a wooden toy crane, plastic cones, and playful, reinvented traffic signs.

In particular, the offering featured a tactile photograph of a 1967 archival image, designed in Bologna by MAD Servizi Culturali and printed in Ottawa at Terra Reproductions.

The NAC pilot project raised questions about how recorded tactile guidance might be combined with audiodescription to support greater autonomy, and how technology could deliver this audio context responsively.

These questions will inform a second project developed in collaboration with MAD Servizi Culturali and La Girobussola, centred on a photographic exhibition at Fondazione MAST in Bologna. Complementing the NAC pilot, this phase will explore how audiodescription can accompany tactile exploration through sensor-activated delivery, drawing on technical knowledge exchanged between Italy and Canada.

Canada has committed to becoming barrier-free by 2040, with a growing emphasis on preventing barriers through inclusive design, collaboration and innovation. Tactile Beauty contributes to this broader shift by exploring how accessibility can be integrated into artistic creation from the outset, rather than added afterwards. I am currently pursuing funding opportunities to continue bringing knowledge from Italy and abroad into the Canadian context.

The next Canadian phase will focus on further developing tactile prototypes through collaboration with local artists and technologists, and testing with previous Blind and Low Vision Ottawa-based consultants, and a focus group led by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB).

I am actively seeking collaborations with universities and academic researchers to further test and evaluate my prototypes before making them available to the public.

Ultimately, the integration of tactility in the arts aims to move beyond the tactile translation of an original work towards tactile expression and aesthetics. Rather than treating tactility solely as a means of improving accessibility, Tactile Beauty asks whether it might become an emerging artistic practice in its own right—inviting artists, researchers and institutions to explore its possibilities together.