Wheelchair Book

Wheelchair, Baggage Tags, Guide

Shirley Zhong

This wheelchair, a device of movement, has been encumbered with luggage tags. The tags, used for denoting special instructions for certain luggage, designate the wheelchair as an item transported differently. However, its emptiness evokes an absent body for those instructions to be performed for. In this piece, Zhong has used these bureaucratic signifiers as storytellers. Wheelchair Book is a work of disability solidarity, presented in a location, Venice, where disabled travel is especially precarious, but it is reckoning with what all travel concerns: what we bring with us.