Costa Badia

The Cripple Gallery 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. The project challenges ableist and hierarchical models of cultural creation and management, proposing new forms of organisation, accessibility, and co-existence.

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 Badía 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 Badía 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 and has presented performance art pieces at MUSAC in León, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and CA2M in Móstoles. 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).