100 ways to touch wood
video, 2023co-written with Odette Yiu
What does it mean to seek refuge in comfort? With an interest in the rituals we iterate across different timeframes (such as sleep/wake, life/birthdays, death/grief), ‘100 ways to touch wood’ began as a question wondering whether specific rituals of today’s mundane – doomscrolling, aisle wandering, smoking – make us automatons or re-root us into the human. Curious about the variable possibilities of “touching wood”, while appreciating the apotropaic precision of the expression, we realised that these are tools ritualistically applied to relinquish and reject, and/or to preserve and protect. Loosely adopting these phrases as conceptual framework, “100 Ways to Touch Wood” mirrors and repeated attempts to carve out forms of agency and control against (in)visible structures that deny us these. The work-in-progress seeks to examine individual and collective rituals, both intentional and unconscious, as a compensatory tool to grapple with alienation and fatalism in an isolating urban landscape, altogether converging into its own spatiotemporal experience of constructed comfort.
