Disability Rich, adapted from 1924 Pieces of Me
by The Man in the Purple Hat

One billion units of the wealth disabled people are so often imagined to receive.

While conducting research into financial trauma and disability, I came across a familiar stream of commentary portraying disabled people as scroungers: always looking for a handout and somehow getting rich on benefits.

As someone with lived experience of physical disability, neurodiversity, mental ill-health and financial trauma, I decided to find out where all my alleged money was. Having looked down the back of the sofa and found nothing, I went down a full-blown ADHD rabbit hole and made a meme coin.

The image

To create the coin, I returned to the 1,924 brain scans that formed 1924 Pieces of Me. I searched each one for some visible trace of my financial distress; for the neurodivergence that can make financial decision-making challenging; and for the brain damage that produces the physical differences I experience in my body.

I could not find any of it (at least, not in any form I could name).

But one image held me. Perhaps it was the colours. Perhaps it was the shapes. Perhaps it was something I could not see but could nevertheless feel.

I used that image as the seed for an AI-generated artwork while contemplating what it means to live with financial trauma. The resulting artwork became the image for DISRICH: my reflections on money, disability and financial trauma given form.

The scan did not reveal my financial trauma. The artwork gave it somewhere to exist.

The metaphor

Disability Rich is a satirical conceptual artwork about two systems of belief: what makes money valuable, and what makes a person disabled.

Money is made up. That does not make it imaginary. It works because enough of us—and the institutions around us—agree that it does.

My body, brain and mind are real. So are pain, impairment and difference. But, understood through the social model, disability is produced by the world built around them: inaccessible environments, hostile attitudes, and political and administrative systems that decide what support is available and what kind of life a disabled person is allowed to afford.

That is where the joke sits. A billion DISRICH can appear beside my name and make me look spectacularly wealthy. But a number on a screen is not rent, food, care, transport, savings or power.

At a moment when disabled people are again being discussed as costs to be controlled, that distinction matters. We can be accused of receiving too much while benefits rules, social-care charges and capital limits restrict what some disabled people may keep, save or control. Our needs become figures, thresholds, assessments and suspicions.

So perhaps I have finally found all the money I am supposed to have. It exists as DISRICH: abundant, countable, potentially tradeable and possibly useless. The market can decide what it thinks the tokens are worth. The artwork asks a different question:

What does money mean if it cannot be turned into security?

One billion

I intend to retain ten million units as an artist’s reserve. A further ten million units are intended for ten future allocations of one million each, potentially involving disabled people, disabled people’s organisations, charities, museums or cultural institutions as conversations around the work develop. Any allocation involving an individual will require informed consent and consideration of possible tax or means-tested-benefit consequences.

I make no call to arms, ask nothing of the market and promise no return. I place the work into view as a metaphor for the disability financial experience. We will see what, if anything, happens to it.

Authorship

Disability Rich is a work by The Man in the Purple Hat, adapted from 1924 Pieces of Me.