Abstract The Preliminal Laboratory is a transdisciplinary artistic research methodology developed in Puerto Rico since 2023, using performance, dance, and devising to investigate neurodivergent experience as a system of knowledge production. This paper argues that neurodiversity constitutes an endangered conceptual world: a minoritised cognitive and perceptual ecosystem whose distinct modes of attention, association, and embodied understanding are systematically rendered illegible by dominant academic and cultural structures.
Drawing on two completed performance works, Preliminal (2023), which explored ADHD and cognitive fragmentation, and Abismal (2025), which examined schizophrenia and anxiety, the paper presents the laboratory as a site where neurodivergent epistemologies are not represented but enacted. Rather than producing knowledge about neurodivergence, the methodology produces knowledge through it: using movement, liminality, and devising as instruments for accessing and articulating forms of experience that resist conventional representational frameworks.
Situated within a Puerto Rican colonial context, itself a political threshold, a territory that exists at the permanent edge of recognition, the project positions the neurodivergent body as doubly marginalized: a minoritised cognitive mode within a minoritised cultural geography. The paper proposes that artistic research is uniquely equipped to hold these endangered conceptual worlds open, giving them legibility without assimilating them into dominant epistemological frameworks. The Preliminal Laboratory offers a methodology and a set of documented practices for doing exactly that.