Know How: Incurable
Participatory Installation, 2025
Headlands Center for the Arts
Collaboration with Chef Damon Little, LMFT Karen Oberdorfer, and psychomotor therapist Cindi Stephan. Photos by Alva Alvarez
Know How: Incurable uses the framework of ‘incurability’ to position sickness and health on a fragile, fluctuating spectrum. The project counteracts an institutional mindset that tries to ‘heal’ and ‘fix’ us on its own terms and invites conversations and actions aimed at restoring an intuitive, somatic relationship to our own needs within community contexts.
In June and July 2025, the project centered on breath remedies through a series of public interventions at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. Visitors were invited to select breath remedies intuitively, with Cindi Stephan and Karen Oberdorfer facilitating breathwork and dialogue. Wood also collaborated with Headlands chef, Damon Little on an installation and shared meal, integrating Damon’s stroke recovery process in which he developed an individualized plan using repetition in woodworking and food preparation to transform everyday actions into a poetics of healing.
In 2025-2026, the project will be developed in rural Nebraska in collaboration with McCook Community Kitchen to explore remedies and concepts of mobility.
Know How: Budapest (Prototype)
How To / Know How, 2-person exhibit with Beata Szabo at Art Quarter Budapest, HU
Know How was first prototyped at Art Quarter Budapest in 2024. This iteration explored remedies related to beauty and fertility and included performances by Imre Vass and Agnes Grelinger in a 2-person exhibition with Beata Szabo.
"I was struck by how each piece challenged traditional ways of knowing, exploring the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious, the known and unknown. The exhibition featured personal remedy recipes on cards within the installation, making the experience feel more connected and actionable – almost like providing a guide for engaging with the art and its themes…As a curator, it was essential for me to see how the exhibition communicated with its audience. The interactivity and exchanges that arose during the viewing showed just how deeply art can influence our perception and understanding. This reaffirmed the importance of creating spaces where such interactions can take place."
- Anna Galeeva (PAS Berlin)