Image description: A brazilian woman sat on a manual wheelchair in the middle of the street. There seems to be old houses and buildings behind her, and it’s approaching evening. The wheelchair is lit with a computer underneath it, and blue wires connected all over it. The wheelchair is slightly tilted, appearing to be drifting, thus fire sparks coming out of the wheels. The image has a futuristic feel to it. 

While the rest of the world argues over artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley builds its kingdom of liquid-glass AI agents, Janice Mascarenhas is in Rio de Janeiro finding old hardware tech like phones, keyboards, and wires, and putting sound speakers into wheelchairs. Born and raised in Rio, she describes feeling the need to turn limited resources into language. With art pieces like the sound-cane dropped this spring, her work insists on imagining mobility aids as a site of language. 

Our interview took place over email, due to spotty internet connectivity — and across every answer, Mascarenhas keeps collapsing a binary: past vs. future, adaptation vs. intelligence, digital vs. physical. She went viral this May after posting an image of her wheelchair-sound-speaker concept. A few days later, she followed up with a post introducing herself to her new followers, opening up about her neurological condition and the limited movement it causes. She ended it clearly: ‘this post is not about overcoming anything.’

Like all of us who live with a disability, we inherently reject clean binaries. I often want to be seen, but I’d like to be seen and still left with my humanity. I’d like to be left with the innate beauty of who I am in my disability. 

And ultimately, isn’t that what we all want — to be truly seen and understood? And yet, what drew me to her art wasn’t that it was just making a statement, but that it was inviting a dialogue. Disability is the lost art of interdependence, it is the lost art of beauty, it’s the lost art of the future, and it’s also the lost art of possibility. 

For you, which is it? For Mascarenhas, it’s increasingly at frustration with the future of a perfect, clean and tech utopianism. Instead, it’s increasingly pointing to a future that’s loud, collective, imperfect – and a sensitive and living one all at once. 

Here, we catch up with Mascarenhas ahead of her debut at Museu do Amanhã in the fall, and talk all about material memory, spacecrafts, and collectivism. 

Cripple Media: Tell us a little bit about yourself – how do you describe what you do? 

Janice Mascarenhas: I’m a Brazilian multimedia artist, braider and creative director. I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. My work started through hair, the internet, and this need to turn limited resources into language. I didn’t really enter art or fashion through a traditional door. I had to build my practice through braiding, photography, styling, character-building, objects, reused technology and creative direction.

CM: What made you want to create art around disability? 

JM: I think it started when I began to understand disability not only as something related to the body, but also as something that exposes the failures of the world around us. The city, work, public spaces and the idea of productivity are usually not designed for everybody.

When I look at a wheelchair, a crutch or a bengal, I don’t see only a medical object. I see support, extension, technology, language and the possibility of invention.

I’m interested in turning these objects into presence, sound, sculpture and image. Not to hide disability, and not to turn it into a story of “overcoming”, but to imagine another place for it, something more powerful, more beautiful, more complex.

CM: What do you hope people take away from your art? 

JM: There’s a lot of rebellion in my work. I was often told there was no reason to be subversive, that it was just ingratitude. But through digital media, I found a community. Now I’m trying to expand that community into real physical spaces.

I want to amplify different voices and create encounters that don’t only live online. 

We talk about digital technology as progress, but dissident bodies know very well the real impact it has on our lives. With these works, I hope people understand that the future can also come from leftovers, adaptation and DIY solutions. 

I want the pieces to feel familiar and strange at the same time, something that could exist in a home, on the street, in a workshop, but also in a museum, a ritual, or some kind of spacecraft.

CM: How does your relationship to your disability affect your art? 

JM: I can’t think of the body as something neutral, always available, always productive. My body makes me negotiate with the world all the time, and that becomes part of my method.

Disability makes me think of support, adaptation and accessibility not as secondary things, but as the centre of creation.

CM: When I initially saw your art pieces, it immediately made me think of the future, but still had remnants of the past, especially with your use of hardware tech. How do you see that? 

JM: For me, the future isn’t clean, white and empty of memory. I use old hardware because it carries material memory. It feels closer to people, more popular, less perfect, less corporate. This connects deeply with disability, because disabled bodies are often adapting to the world all the time. and there’s a proper intelligence in that. A bodily, practical, emotional intelligence.

So I see disability and technology meeting in that place: not in the promise of speed or efficiency, but in the possibility of creating support, autonomy, care and presence.

CM: What’s next for you? 

JM: Recently, I was selected to physically develop my sound system canes with Museu do Amanhã, in Rio de Janeiro. It’s one of the main spaces for technology in my city, and the project should come to life sometime between August and September.

I’ll also be part of [Rio Art Week] with wheelchair customisation workshops at Centro Cultural Hélio Oiticica, both spaces have accessibility on site and for transport, so the project is also about connecting disabled people across the city and bringing them into these spaces in a free and more accessible way.

CM: If you could build the world your art is reaching toward, what does it look like?

JM: It would be a world where the body doesn’t have to hide in order to fit, a world where disability isn’t seen as failure, pity or exception, but as a real way of existing, creating and imagining.

Visually, it would have sound, wires, hair, worn-out shine, reused technology, streets, homes, DIY beauty and memory, not a clean, expensive future, but a loud, collective, sensitive and living one. 😍