Costa Badia

The Cripple Gallery: A Manual of Lame Instructions is an artistic, cultural and political project that urges us to rethink art spaces from a disabled viewpoint, understanding a disability not as something lacking but as a critical perspective. Eschewing capacitist and hierarchical models, the project seeks to transform cultural forms of creation, management and coexistence. 

The Cripple Gallery is not meant to be a traditional gallery, but rather a cultural institution under construction: a physical and conceptual space in which to experiment with critical pedagogies, accessibility and collective organisation. It emerges in response to the exclusion historically suffered by disabled people in the artistic world, and is intended as a living research laboratory, where public meetings and collaborative processes can shape new ways of inhabiting art. During the project, which Badia is developing at the Centre for Artists in Residence, she engages with artists and cultural managers in an exercise of collective imagination and community building.

Biography

Costa Badia Melis (Madrid, 1981) is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the UCM, where she is carrying out research into the relationship between museums and disability. She worked in the Education Department of the Reina Sofía Museum from 2022 until September 2025, developing accessible artistic programmes in collaboration with the ONCE Foundation. As an artist, she questions stereotypes of beauty and behaviour, validating errors and exploring how normative and non-normative bodies coexist. 

She participated in the ONCE Foundation’s 8th Biennale of Contemporary Art (2022) and presented performance art pieces at MUSAC (2023), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (2022) and CA2M (2022-2023). Since 2021, she has given classes and lectures on disability and creative accessibility in several masters programmes.

Costa Badia is a recipient of a Residency for Projects in Art and Education (2025/26).