This project, Moving Past Disgust, is created to help volunteers with higher levels of disgust sensitivity overcome their disgust in order to volunteer for events that deal with “disgusting” things. For example, cleaning dirty houses or sorting between edible and mushy vegetables. The aim is to help nonprofits retain volunteers. This can be done via methods like habituation, like when nurses get used to dealing with bodily fluids, or using empathy to combat disgust.
I’m More Of A Dog Person and Other Tales of Horror is a graphic novel that tells 3 short narratives set in a common Singaporean urban space, a single floor of an HDB block. The starting point for these acts of story-telling is observing strangers around Singapore and wondering about their secret lives. What do these people desire, and how do they negotiate those desires with the behaviour demanded of them by society? These thoughts are translated into graphic tales which have grotesque or fantastical elements.
Although there is a long history of supernatural fables and myths and stories in local culture, contemporary narratives in Singapore (literature, TV and film) tends towards naturalism and realism. Countering this, Block X is fascinated with the supernatural and the grotesque as a way of defamiliarising the mundane and everyday in Singapore. In exploring what goes on behind multiple doors,I’m More Of A Dog Person and Other Tales of Horror also follows a mode of telling a multiplicity of stories about urban spaces.