Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe: On Okin Collective's Video Works

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Figure 1. Okin Collective, Operation—For Something Black and Hot, 2012, 18 minutes, 30 seconds, single- channel video (production still). Courtesy of the artist Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies I N P R A C T I C E Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe: On Okin Collective’s Video Works Jihoon Kim Okin Collective is a group made up of three Korean artists ( Jin Shiu, Kim Hwayong, and Yi Joungmin) who have over the past few years been productively concerned with an array of political, social, and cultural issues from both local and global perspectives. Such issues include the process of urban redevelopment in Seoul, the global environmental crisis, utopian aspirations in the neoliberal economy, and the Korean authorities’ ideological control of citizenship. The collective is named after Okin- dong, a small neighborhood in Seoul marked by the Okin Apartments, an apartment complex constructed in 1971 on a demolished shantytown as part of a modernization project led by the dictatorial government of former president Park Chung Hee. Having once symbolized the fast-paced modernization of Seoul, the apartment complex eventually became dilapidated and thus was destined to Camera Obscura 93, Volume 31, Number 3 doi 10.1215/02705346-3662057 © 2016 by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press 141 Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 142 • Camera Obscura be demolished when the collective’s members visited one of their colleagues who lived there in 2009. Witnessing the rapid urban beautiication process that involved the forceful eviction of the apartment complex’s tenants, Jin, Kim, and Yi agreed to work collectively to excavate and bring into relief the conlicting temporal and topological layers of the existing buildings: namely, the tension between the old memories inscribed in the buildings and shared by their residents and the complex’s state as a precarious site of impending demolition. Okin Collective’s members explain in reference to their formation, “At the irst meeting at the site [the Okin Apartments], we were shocked by the strange spectacle and felt a strong sense of empathy. It caused us to keep returning there and ind some ways to talk about our feelings and the situation.”1 This description of Okin’s founding illustrates that the social, political, and economic dynamics acknowledged by the individual artists motivated their collaboration and collective authorship. This shared consciousness spurred Okin Collective to hold a series of artistic activities aimed at intervening in the apartment complex and highlighting its situations. Okin-dong vacance (Okindong Vacation) was an event organized by the collective in 2009 in collaboration with Okin Apartment residents and various artists that ran for one night and two days. During the event, residents shared their memories with visitors, musicians conducted improvised rap performances, and the collective posted photo documentation of the complex on its blog. In 2010, Okin organized an exhibition entitled Open Site. This event was held in the complex amid its ongoing destruction, and it transformed dilapidated sites, such as the complex’s rooftop and last remaining apartment blocks, into a space for visitors’ play and commentary. Along with the previous events set against the backdrop of the complex, the exhibition, which featured projects by Okin’s members as well as those of several fellow artists, took collaboration and participation as its two operating schemes, thus enabling visitors to experience in sensory and affective ways the site’s precariousness, the persistence of the memories associated with it, and the conlict between the residents’ Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe • 143 existence and the corporate power of urban redevelopment. For instance, Ghost Bar (Yuk King Tan and Lee Jooyoung, 2010) turned the nearly destroyed interior of an apartment block into a temporary bar, where visitors were encouraged to view the remnants of residents’ belongings, including collected furniture and other detritus that allegorically invoked the past lives and memories of the complex’s former occupants and the geopolitical tension caused by the area’s destruction. Likewise, in Bowling for Okin (Jin Shiu and Yi Joungmin, 2010) Okin’s members placed two bowling balls that they found in a demolished building on the complex’s rooftop. They then invited visitors to perform a bowling game as an act of embodying the ephemeral dreams of the complex’s former residents, an act that would ictionally sublimate the politics of memory into an aesthetic play. These collaborative open projects, which aimed to create a dynamic exchange between past and present, private and public, and art and life, testify to what Grant H. Kester considers to be central to contemporary collaborative art: “the ability of aesthetic experience to transform our perceptions of difference and to open space for forms of knowledge that challenge cognitive, social, or political conventions.”2 Since the demolition of the complex, Okin Collective has expanded their collaborative artistic work into different mediums and platforms, holding a series of workshops and performances and operating a podcast, Studio +82, which serves as an open forum to discuss a variety of cultural and political issues (such as gender inequality, racism, and social rights in Korea) as well as a showcase for independent music and art scenes. Undoubtedly, Okin’s emphasis on participation and collaboration, its transformation of the Okin Apartments into a transitory platform for the artists’ encounters with the overlapping political and cultural issues ingrained in the complex, and its convivial gesture toward the audience all pertain to the repertoires of the nowfamous “relational aesthetics” proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud.3 This overlap demonstrates the group’s aspiration to establish its projects as a shared world, a provisional community of the audience whose common activities aim to renew relations between art Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 144 • Camera Obscura and life. While Okin’s projects are in this sense aligned with the global and local burgeoning of artists’ collectives since the late 1990s, what makes the group distinct is the way in which its relational aesthetics previously practiced in the Okin Apartments has been expanded into the form of the moving image since 2012. That is, Okin’s aim to engender the visitor’s sensory and affective engagement with the demolished site of the apartment complex has led to a series of video works derived from their open-form performances. The collective performances are not simply the subject matter of the videos; they also inspire the structure of the videos, an open form that foregrounds the performances’ participatory and interactive aspects. Accordingly, their viewers are able to witness how the performances’ audiences are invited to practice symbolic codes underlying the operation of the apparatus governing their political life as well as affective gestures that express how they cope with the catastrophic consequences of contemporary society and how they dream of a utopia. The resulting videos, then, share the performances to create a “space of the common,” in the sense of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s use of the concept, a space in which the multitude’s communicative activities produce both individual and collective bodies as the basis for a renewed understanding of their common social and cultural conditions.4 Operation—For Something Black and Hot (2012) is a singlechannel video that documents Okin Collective’s performance by the same title that was set in an unnamed contemporary society faced with a ictional environmental crisis, recalling the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 (ig. 1). In this diegetic space, the press is so controlled by the society’s authority that its citizens are exposed to a media blackout, which prevents them from escaping the impending unidentiied disaster. The video starts with the sound of an air-raid siren that signals the state of emergency, and it takes the form of a quasi- educational guide that teaches the citizens how to survive after the disaster through practicing gi-gymnastics (gi means “energy” in Korean), a ictional exercise. Set on a vacant rooftop of a building, which recalls Okin’s previous projects based on the apartment complex, the video pre- Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe • 145 sents three performers’ drills involving gi- gymnastics along with a monotone female voice- over that interpellates viewers as “you,” advising “you to repeat” the drills in order to “put the operation into action.” The repetition of the voice’s instructions stresses a sense of urgency. The drills, which feature commands like “shake your head,” “close your eyes,” “catch your breath,” “crouch as much as you can,” “listen to your mind’s breath,” and “roll up your tailbone,” are intended to teach the citizens self-defense skills at a time when the government has failed to protect its people against an environmental catastrophe. After the performers’ demonstration, the video ends with the female voice warning that “the operation begins from now on.” For this work, Okin’s members studied a series of instructional videos produced by several public and state agencies (such as the Korea Disaster Relief Association and the Korean National Disaster Management Institute) responsible for teaching citizens the key postures in evacuation drills in case of an emergency or disaster, and they blended the videos’ codes and conventions with the postures of gi-gymnastics. To be sure, the group’s interest in the codiied and ritualized aspect of social gestures attests to the tradition of conceptual art and appropriation art, or “culture jamming,” as a subgenre of alternative/activist media practices that “mine mainstream culture to critique it.”5 The newly composed drills present highly codiied and choreographed postures, which aim to turn the political and affective dimensions of both the gymnastics and the survival instructions into a new collective, participatory experience. On the one hand, the individualized aspect of self-training and meditation in gi-gymnastics is transformed into a collective aesthetic activity, one that is corporeal and through which audiences are able to produce a collective lesh that embodies the precariousness of the catastrophe as their common condition of living. On the other hand, the group’s transformation of the gi- postures into instructions for survival reveals that the forms of governing citizens’ security in contemporary society have corporeal and biopolitical dimensions, however powerless they may be in the catastrophe that the society has produced but cannot control. Com- Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 146 • Camera Obscura posed of long shots taken with a ixed camera, the video stresses the three performers’ drills and thereby invites viewers to repeat them. Along with this open, minimalist visual structure, Okin inserts a series of offscreen sound effects, such as the siren and the sound of a car crash, and juxtaposes them with the rooftop’s nearly vacant setting to extend the state of crisis in the diegetic space to the viewer’s contemporary social experience. The footage of the Fukushima disaster that’s inserted in the video’s end credits once again highlights the relation between the performance as an aesthetic activity and the social. The video Don Quijote del carre (Don Quijote of the Street, 2013) documents Okin’s performance on the streets of Barcelona, Spain. Okin’s members provided passersby with an excerpt from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (part 1, 1605), a conversation between Don Quixote, who declares that he will ight the giants, and Sancho Panza, who tries to persuade him that the giants are actually windmills. The members asked participants to recite the excerpt and interviewed them about their thoughts on its meaning, including which character they preferred—Don Quixote the idealist or Sancho Panza the pragmatic realist—and what the giants (windmills) symbolize. Resembling the process of actors auditioning on the street for a ictional play based on the novel, the resulting video presents a variety of performances by the interviewees, highlighting their different verbal and gestural acting styles. In this sense, the performances correspond to Okin’s consistent interest in the affective dimension of human life and its relation to politics, which is manifested in the provisionally conceived activities aimed at exposing the gap between aesthetics and politics and renegotiating the relationship between the two. Also, the video’s positioning of the members as interviewers, as well as the members’ use of a microphone and handheld camera, it into the “participatory” mode of documentary in Bill Nichols’s categorization, in that the members serve as agitators who trigger social actors to make a particular action and change their situation.6 This mode thus echoes Okin’s objective to create an open form across different mediums and settings. Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe • 147 Despite the differences in choreography and speech as well as in the age, sexuality, and class of the interviewees, what is notable in the video is the commonality among the ways in which the participants understand and embody Don Quixote. The interviewees identify themselves with the role of Don Quixote, and their understanding of the excerpt turns out to be fully grounded in what it means to live in the here and now of their social and economic situations. The interviewee-performers encompass not simply Spanish residents in Barcelona but also diasporic residents and tourists from around the globe. As the performances progress, the video presents an array of social, economic, and political conlicts that are locally distinct but have compelling correspondences on a global scale. One Chilean tourist compares the giants Don Quixote faces to the political and economic inequality that has governed Chile, considering his ight to be an allegory of a middleclass strike as a trigger of socialist revolution. The tourist’s words resonate with those of several Spanish residents, which commonly point out the powerlessness of the current Spanish government and the exacerbated local economic instability caused by the dramatic increase in unemployment and rent costs. By creating the space of the commons in which the different social actors perform the same ictional text and reach a similar allegorical understanding of it, the video offers the various local economic and political problems a global perspective. Here, too, the video’s documentation of the performances presents another idea of the commons, the multitude’s utopian aspiration for a better society that they believe is allegorically embedded within the story of Don Quixote. The participants all love Don Quixote’s spirit of adventure, his bravery, and his keen awareness of ighting against the windmill-giants as his destiny. Simultaneously foregrounding the allegorical understanding and utopian aspiration, the participants’ varying yet correlated responses testify to the performative aspect of memory noted by Mieke Bal. She writes, “Performativity is the unique occurrence of an act in the here and now. . . . It is the moment where words detach themselves from their sleep in dictionaries and from people’s linguistic competence to be launched as weapons or seductions, exer- Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 148 • Camera Obscura cising their weight, striking force.”7 The interviews function as a device for engendering the participants’ association of their performance of the story with their awareness of the “here and now.” Okin’s practice of gleaning the interviewees’ common utopian aspiration from their different performances of Don Quixote suggests, too, the group’s conception of collectivity as one that unties community from its essentialized link to a uniied and universal identity. The sense of collectivity proposed by the diverse array of performances based on the same story of Don Quixote its into an alternative idea of community that is not premised on race, nation, sexuality, and gender. Rather, this collectivity produces more open, luid, and democratic relationships between the participants who are distinct in identity yet share a common interest in changing the global social and economic crisis. In this way, Okin’s conception of collectivity echoes what Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben have proposed as a nonessentialized idea of community, a community that promotes a sense of “being-with” or is based upon the notion of “belonging” without any prescribed identity.8 However, this does not mean that Okin’s idea of collectivity presented in Don Quijote del carre dispenses with any consideration of the differences in gender and sexuality. What Nancy’s and Agamben’s ideas of community suggest is that while the alternative idea of community is unrepresentable in terms of existing identity categories, it operates in ways that enable a network of relations to be formed across these categories while also respecting their differences. Seen from this perspective, the Don Quixote story in Okin’s video functions as a nodal point to produce a new relation between the participants with different racial, national, gender, and sexual identities, inasmuch as it triggers both their awareness of the global political and economic crisis and their utopian aspiration. In conceiving this participatory form, Okin did not prescribe rules as to how participants should perform the story, nor did the collective provide garments or props (except a bar) to help their performances look more faithful to the theatrical adaptation of the story. Instead, the participants had the liberty of playing the role of Don Quixote in an improvised manner based on their differ- Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe • 149 ent identities: as a tenderhearted young woman; a strong, middleaged woman; and a man involved in a gay relationship performing alongside his partner in a display of mutual intimacy. Accordingly, Don Quijote del carre expresses the participants’ different gestures and verbal performances individually and links them without any hierarchy. This results in a sense of community that acknowledges differences in race, nation, gender, and sexuality but nonetheless shares a collective experience. In sum, Okin’s videos can be read as projects that foreground and explore an array of interrelated ideas and issues that revolve around collectivity. Taking people’s performative acts as their nodal point, the videos demonstrate open forms that are produced through and resonate with their collective participation. Presenting the catastrophic situation of contemporary society and participants’ utopian aspirations, the videos construct the “space of the commons.” This space is made by people’s performative practices, which produce both a common affective understanding of the present and a shared envisioning of the future as the overlapping temporalities of collectivity, inviting viewers to perform catastrophe and utopia in ways that extend the audience’s play into the sociopolitical and economic dimensions of their lives. In so doing, Okin’s video works emblematize the “aesthetics as politics” that Jacques Rancière reads as a notable tendency of global contemporary art that aspires to bridge and traverse the artistic and the non-artistic in collaborative projects, an aesthetics that consists of “reconiguring the distribution of the sensible which deines the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects [and] to render visible what had not been.”9 Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 150 • Camera Obscura Notes 1. “Interview with Okin Collective,” art4d asia, 6 September 2013, art4d.asia/news- detail.php?id=311&title=Okin+Collective. 2. Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 11. 3. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 25–48. 4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 197. 5. Leah A. Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media (London: Polity, 2011), 22. 6. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 115–24. 7. Mieke Bal, “Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity,” Bojimans Bulletin 1, no. 2 (2001): 8. 8. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 9. Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics as Politics,” Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity, 2009), 25. Published by Duke University Press Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe • 151 Jihoon Kim is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University, South Korea. He is the author of Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (2016). Currently, he is working on a new book manuscript entitled “Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media, New Platforms, and the Documentary.” Published by Duke University Press