Emma Prats

Touch Wood takes as its starting point the popular expression, the associated gesture, and the underlying superstition. The project seeks to reflect on our capacity for action, perlocutionary coding, and how ritualisation determines the subject matter. Superstition holds that the sound produced by a hand coming into contact with wood stops the malign spirits inhabiting it from listening to the desire we have just uttered, thereby preventing its reversal. The execution and repetition of this gesture provokes and prolongs an exercise in reciprocal recognition. But if wood acts as a catalyst—simultaneously a material of threat and of protection—can it also act as a witness to and producer of language?

Thinking from the interference with the materiality that shapes the world, Touch Wood revisits the performativity encoded in the collective imagination, navigating our uses of body, sound, and word in interaction with the landscape.

Biography

Emma Prats (Barcelona, 2001) works with the appearance or context of specific gestures that manifest aspects of the codification of language and performativity. Deeply rooted in the collective, she focuses on gestures that articulate situations involving recognition or perceptual processes. Through repetition, amplification, and appropriation, she suggests a displacement of attention, while investigating the conditions of possibility.

Her work has been displayed at Sala d’Art Jove; ART NOU; MACBA; MUSE - Museo delle Scienze (all 2024). She was a member of the sixth edition of JAI — Institute of Artistic Practices (Artium, Tabakalera, Oteiza Museum); the PiroEcologías case study of the Organismo Año Uno programme (TBA21); and the Departament Exotèric artistic research group (MACBA).

Emma Prats is a recipient of a Three-month Residency for Environmental Projects (2025).