the burners / calling home - WIP

2026
Various burner phone models cast in agarwood incense
Participatory forest walk and performance

WORK IN PROGRESS:
Agarwood -- the wood of the gods -- is among the most prized and rarest substances in the world for its fragrant and medicinal qualities. Traditionally it has been used in Chinese and E/Southeastern medicinal practices, and burned as part of ancestor veneration and calling upon the gods in homes, temples and ceremonial rites.  Today, these rituals still endure transnationally.

The Burners (working title) convenes around the sculpture's materiality and conceptual site of the "burner phone" as a covert comms device. 

The work is activated through a participatory forest walk and performance reading/ritual that interweaves the contemporary worlding of AI-driven surveillance capitalism, consent and agency of the critically endangered Aquilaria tree species that transform into Agarwood as a hormonal response to environmental trauma.

The working title of the reading:  HOT-rights and ICE 




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