This publication is built by someone who stood in a room at the Van Abbemuseum and recognized it. Ahmet Ogut’s Exploded City — scale models of buildings that no longer exist, shown intact. He guided visitors through that room every week for six months. Each time he thought: this is how I think.

He also knows the other image. Screaming inside a transparent plastic cube, one cubic decimetre, lying on the street. Pedestrians walking past without noticing.

He draws in Bic pen. No correction. No undo. Sign language works the same way: meaning in the body, in movement, in time.

The time-lag. You receive the room three seconds late. You attend two schools — in one you lip-read and guess, in the other you sign and the hearing world disappears. Then you leave the second one.

He has also been in the room where the lag disappears entirely — where everyone shares a language and nobody needs to translate. That room exists. It just doesn’t last. The grey zone between worlds is where the work comes from. He stays there deliberately.

They put a wheelchair ramp in a heritage zone, got fined, kept going. Permanent ramp in year four. Tribunal. Fine after fine. Ten years later, permission arrived in the post. They named a beer after it.

Disability culture has built an enormous body of knowledge. Almost none of it reaches the places where culture gets made and interpreted. Because nobody’s looking.

Put the reader in a room. The image makes the argument. They get there before you name it. A reader finishes an article and the room has changed. Not because they learned something. Because they saw something.

Two kinds of knowledge. Experience is the argument. Scholarship is evidence. The ramp, the lag, the room full of eyes come first. Citations after, if at all.