When performance artist Julie Laffin curated the first “Site Unseen” environmental installation and performance event at the Cultural Center in fall of 2004, she couldn’t have known that the consequences would be so life altering. Laffin, who has been an important part of the Chicago performance community since the early 90s, also contributed a piece to that first festival, developed in collaboration with Dolores Wilber. Presented in the majestic GAR room at the Cultural Center—the one dedicated to those who died in the Civil War—“Monument: Bodies on Foreign Soil” involved dozens of woolen military blankets, eerily lined up as if to suggest body bags.

From those artifacts has come Laffin’s personal battle with a determined foe—and a focus on disability issues that shape this year’s “Site Unseen: (Dis)Abling Conditions.” For one night only—Monday, Nov. 9, 6-9 p.m.—the Cultural Center will be filled with performances, visual art, audio pieces, movement art, and multimedia created by and about people living with disabilities.

Not long after that first “Site Unseen,” Laffin was diagnosed with advanced neurological Lyme disease, and also developed a severe array of environmental sensitivities that make treating the disease with antibiotics, as is usually the case, impossible without creating more sickness. Unable to leave her home in McHenry County (where she relocated hoping to find respite from city pollution, only to discover that crop dusting causes even more problems) for long stretches, Laffin appears in this year’s “Site Unseen” via Skype hook-up. She and assistant curator Clover Morell, who has waged her own battle with celiac disease in recent years, present “Remote Intimations,” in which Laffin will discuss her condition with the audience while Morell serves tea.

Laffin onscreen with Morell

At a rehearsal on Oct. 26, Laffin’s beaming face, framed by long white hair, filled the onscreen stage at the Claudia Cassidy Theater. Outside, a video monitor played a loop of Laffin explaining how she got to the point where she lives “in a bubble.” It turns out that those army blankets were treated with lots of pesticides, and when Laffin washed and dried them in her studio, the chemicals “aerosolized,” in her phrase, and she ingested them. Since then, she has found that exposure to many common chemicals leaves her with symptoms such as vertigo, blurry vision, nausea, and other conditions that she describes as “chemical flu.”

The irony of curating site-specific work when she can no longer be on site isn’t lost on Laffin, though she says, “It’s not the [2004] show that made me sick or changed my life, but it was working with those blankets.” Prior to her illness, Laffin was famous for body-intensive, interactive work. Her outrageously long red dress has graced numerous festivals with many pieces that meditate on the iconography of traditional feminine forms—several times, her pieces also involved Laffin covering an outdoor area with big red lipstick kisses.

“I’m interfacing with the audience, I’m kissing the floors of [now-defunct] Randolph Street Gallery, covering myself with all kinds of metals and paints, and never gave it a thought,” says Laffin via phone interview. “My list of [environmental sensitivities] was very limited. I couldn’t tolerate smoke. I was successful at avoiding the stuff that got to me and never thought much about it. Looking back, I realize that there was a very gradual progression. Now the progression is very fast. They tried to treat the Lyme [diagnosed after her symptoms appeared post-2004] with antibiotics and my immune system went wacko.”

But despite the debilitating nature of her condition, Laffin hasn’t given up on “Site Unseen.” Last year, she and Claire Geall Sutton, the director of theatre for the Department of Cultural Affairs, had to work out the logistics without Laffin actually being present. This year, Skype and videoconferencing has made it possible for Laffin to be in on more meetings and rehearsals—and of course, also provided a way for Laffin to be present via hook-up the night of the event. (In another moment of irony, I noticed on Oct. 26 that the hallway leading up to the Claudia Cassidy sported “wet paint” signs—the very sort of chemical that would present huge problems for Laffin if she were on-site.)

This is the first year that “Site Unseen” has focused on a theme, and given Laffin’s struggles, the idea of disability was foremost for both the artist and Sutton. “Site Unseen” is limited to Chicago-area artists, both emerging and established. The two put out a call for proposals last spring, and some of the proposals they received showed that the definition of “disability” itself is quite fluid.

“We had proposals from people wanting to do work about our failure to integrate immigrants into our society,” says Laffin. Other proposals suggested the “disabling” brought on by “our failed economy, the failure of languages. We had a broad range of interpretations on the theme. We did decide to focus in on the more physical or medical or cognitive disabilities.” (Coincidentally, one of the current exhibits at the Cultural Center, photographer and social worker Jane Fulton Alt’s “After the Storm,” fits in with those broader “disabling” themes by depicting the Lower Ninth Ward in the aftermath of Katrina.)

Among the artists participating in “Site Unseen” this year are playwright and disabilities rights activist Mike Ervin, co-director of the Access Project at Victory Gardens , and his wife, activist, writer and performer Rahnee Patrick, in a sketch-comedy piece entitled “The 2327 Commandments for Communicating with the Handicapable: Disability Etiquette 101.” At the Oct. 26 rehearsal and photo shoot, Ervin says that, in the piece, “we pretend that this issue is as dark and complex and mysterious as people pretend it is.”

Patrick, who is also the interim program director for Access Living, has severe arthritis and psoriasis. As an example of disability-etiquette fail, she recounts the time that she was at a laundromat and a woman approached her and asked, “Could you talk to my daughter about the dangers of playing with matches?”—assuming that Patrick had been burned in a fire. In the past, Patrick and Ervin have also taken aim at Jerry Lewis and his pity-party approach to people living with disabilities through “Jerry’s Orphans,” an organization started by Ervin, who was himself a one-time Muscular Dystrophy Association “poster child.”

“We do so much work as protesters, which is really street theatre,” says Patrick. “It will be interesting to bring it into a more mainstream venue.”

As I talked to Patrick and Ervin, Judith Harding of Still Point Theatre Collective worked with a group of adults living with autism in “May I Have,” which will take place in the Cultural Center’s Randolph Street Café. An integrated ensemble of adults, with and without developmental disabilities, paired off and waltzed in front of hinged screens made of plastic sheet wrap—a commentary on the ways in which people with disabilities “stick out” in public, and yet are sealed off from others.

“Site Unseen” serves another underserved community in addition to the artists with disabilities featured this year. Performance venues dedicated to multidisciplinary and experimental art have disappeared at an alarming rate in Chicago since the early 90s heyday when Laffin started out—among those that have vanished are Randolph Street, Artemisia, MoMing, and many other places.

“There is a tremendous need for this kind of venue,” says Laffin. “We’re kind of in a position where we want so much to support that. We offer an honorarium to the artists [in ‘Site Unseen’] and we’re very committed to that. When I was performing at Links and NAME and those places, we sometimes got paid or rarely got paid. Not getting paid is also an environmental barrier.”

Though the event can only take place for one night, thanks to the bursting-at-the-seams programming that DCA puts in the space, Sutton and Laffin both note that other experimental performance events have spun off from “Site Unseen.” The “In>Time Series” is an ongoing collaboration with DCA and the Chicago Performance Network that brings in artists—national and international, as well as local—who do time-based and body-based work. The artists are brought in through both open calls and an invitational basis, and the program includes an incubation process to develop the work. Sutton notes that many of the artists are doing residencies at places like the School of the Art Institute, and lack access to non-academic venues for showing their work while they are in Chicago. DCA also now offers an incubation program for performers and theatre groups throughout the year. LiveWire Theatre has been the most recent beneficiary of the incubation program.

For Sutton, “Site Unseen” this year is about more than showing off the architectural glories of the Cultural Center, though that is definitely one of the side benefits. It’s about creating more awareness around issues of accessibility.

“Our department is fully accessible [as are all the spaces within the Cultural Center], but there are ways we can become more accessible. Instead of thinking of being accessible as being an add-on, we want it to be part of the fabric.”

This year’s “Site Unseen” will feature large-print and Braille programs, as well as ASL interpreters. And Sutton would like the conversation to continue after Nov. 9.

“We had talked about pairing up a doctor with an artist in a certain field for this year. So that could potentially happen for next year.”

Despite the barriers to working in close proximity posed by Laffin’s illness, Sutton and Laffin each speak warmly of the other’s contributions to an event that has become even more of a labor of love. Laffin has just started a new treatment involving re-injecting herself with her own white blood cells in an attempt to boost her compromised immune system. She hasn’t seen results yet, but she says, “The good news is that I find myself in a position to talk about it and make work about it and have other people who are interested in helping me.”

Says Sutton, “The great thing about this show is that it shows how people can overcome anything that is thrown at them. There is such power in overcoming these things and such possibility.”