listen to the city

City&Modern People’s Lives EunSun Park

POINT You are the director of the artist group Listen to the City and chief editor of Urban Drawings, an independent art and architecture magazine. What are you seeking as an artist-cum- chief editor?

Park Listen to the City is an artistic group making efforts to discover the new roles of artists. Modern art answers the question “What is art?” through art. The obsessive self-examination of ‘meta art’ has resulted in an alienation of artists from the external conditions of art through indi- vidual replies to questions concerning what the role of artists is. Listen to the City is a creative, critical community organized to contemplate the external conditions of art more freely. Artists have become more reliant on galleries, curators, and critics due to the advent of neo-liberalism in contemporary art.

Listen to the City is a device through which artists are able to medi- tate and express themselves more spontaneously in this milieu. Listen to the City is especially interested in urban issues. All modern cultures are born and modified within the city. However, an understanding of the ecological conditions of the city in studies related to urban administra- tion remains superficial. These studies fail to create any link to urban ecology and contemporary people’s lives through their understanding of civil engineering, urban landscape, and capital flow. The artist group re-visualizes areas of the city through its magazine Urban Drawings, generating discourse. The true owners of the city are urban dwellers, not experts and politicians.

P Would you introduce Listen to the City? I know you work in diverse areas including exhibitions, workshops, seminars and magazine publication. Park Listen to the City asserts that contemporary art came into being on the spatial background of the city, and attempts to combine urban life and art on the background of the liberal arts. Since 2009 this artist group has published an independent art and architecture magazine, Ur- ban Drawings, to explore the true nature of the city, promoting contem- porary art through exhibitions. The group consists of fine arts major Park Eun-sun, design major Jung Jin-yeol, guest members Jeon Sun-mi and Hwang Moon-ki, and those interested in art. While attending its projects, everyone can consider themselves its members. Through its Seoul Tour Project conducted from the spring of 2010 up to now, Listen to the City has tried to discover something the city government intended to belie. The group also held city exchange exhibitions at the Static Gallery in Liverpool and the Hamilton Gallery in Seoul, exploring and expanding the relationship between the city and people.

P The Seoul Tours Project is a program in which experts partici- pate alongside the general public. I know the program has taken place six times so far. Participants from its first to fourth pro- grams visited where a traditional market coexists with a larges-

scale retail outlet, while attendees in the fifth program visited the Nakdong and Namhan rivers. They then traveled to a model house located in the Gangnam area during the sixth program. Let me know why you selected each place and what you wanted to confirm through such programs.

Park Seoul Tours is an ongoing project with six courses and has been conducted 20 times so far. The travel courses Listen to the City pres- ents include the wrongly restored Cheonggye Stream, the haunted like Garden Five, Lotte Castel Venetia in Hwanghak-dong, Home Plus near Dongdaemun, and a national shrine on Inwang Mountain where visitors can witness clashes between rampant development and the ordinary people’s life and culture. Landmarks tend to be adorned and overstated by the mass media. However, the moment a visitor intervenes in this place, he or she comes to discover what it tries to hide. Participants in tours are transformed from passive conformists adaptive to false monu- mental images of the city to nomads who meet collapsing conventions. The tours are actual activities to deconstruct the innumerable simulacra produced by the city, re-questioning the difference and value of the city of Seoul.

P Listen to the City has criticized Zaha Hadid’s architectural de- signs as buildings with no cultural, social context and said that his buildings could be placed in any city or country. I think this criticism derived from your emphasis on Seoul’s unique identity. I want to hear your concrete description in this regard.

Park The MAXXI, designed by Zaha Hadid, was recently completed in Rome, Italy. Rome-based architect Lorenzo Romito, who belongs to Stalker Lab, said about this building that “Money should be invested in artists, not museums, to recover art. This museum is an obvious failure. Too much money was spent in its building, and the use of its space is inefficient.” Hadid’s design for the new building to be constructed on the site of Dongdaemun Stadium has similar problems. Other problems in- clude that the stadium building was a modern cultural property, but was torn down without sufficient discussion; merchants who were ousted from the Cheonggye Stream area ware ousted again with the building’s demolition over two years; an important Joseon governmental site was discovered after tearing down the stadium, but moved to another place carelessly.

P Forced expulsion caused by redevelopment is a frequently raised issue in Korean society. I want to know how you view this as an artist and citizen. Park The owners of a city are neither administrators nor city planners, but urban dwellers. Seoul architecture plays a key role in alienating its residents. The indiscriminant demolition of buildings for ordinary people (which is like architectural massacre) gradually distances people from the city. The city has become a place like a bus stop with no memory. The soul of a place refers to a place bearing its own unique memory and

spirit. If a building disappears, traces of those who lived there also van- ish. Architecture is a spiritual space containing memories of life that go beyond a mere space to avoid the rain.

The social issues raised in previously question mostly derive from public power or conglomerates. I think Listen to the City has directly criticized such power. But at times I wonder if your group’s criticism is against the city itself or the urban polices car- ried out by the powers that be. What do you think of this? Park What we think of as a city first appeared in the middle ages. Its birth was initially associated with public power, and was established for merchant groups to strengthen their influence and control. As the idea of a city is inseparable from power, it is meaningless to ask whether the focus of criticism is the city itself or public power. Our group works to reveal how power is associated with the city.

Listen to the City established an alternative architecture school for the general public who has never been to Liverpool. The group’s member artists worked on drawings, city models, and novels, based on their imagination. The result was very interesting. Our imagination of different lives and places we have never experienced made us realize our own lives. We did the same thing with North Korea. We suggested 30 Seoul National University of Technology students imagine daily life in North Ko- rea. The result was completely different from those of Seoul and Liver- pool. We try to develop our work to explore the collective unconscious- ness of urbanites and their common sensibility by using the mechanism of imagining others’ lives.

P You mainly address Seoul’s urban redevelopment. As you know however, this issue is no longer limited to Seoul. Urban is- sues and the matter of being a Placelessness are consistently raised in many Asian cities. A number of artists raise these issues in their work. If there are any foreign artists and projects with which Listen to the City shares its ideas, let us know.

Park Lorenzo Romito’s Stalker Lab in Rome, Nina Edge in Liverpool, Sakurai Daizo and Ikeuchi Bunpei of the Tent Theater Company in Japan plan to present exhibitions in partnership with Gwangju’s open-air the- ater troupe Sinmyung. A Liverpool-based artist Nina Edge embroidered the sentence “Privacy does not exist” on a translucent curtain to inform others that artists reside here. The artist poses a question on the bound- ary between public and private arenas, consistently inviting people to her village that is being devastated due to a redevelopment project. Rome- based Stalker Lab is the group of architect majors, but does not con- struct any buildings. What’s important for them are the lives and people constituting Rome. Walking around the suburbs of Rome alongside citi- zens for 30 years, they work on meeting the gypsy communities.

In this event Seoul citizens are chosen, and trip to the Ewha-dong area, the sole mountain village in Seoul, exploring architectures of Seoul. Through the show the organizer invites and has a talk with migrant work- ers, offering them an opportunity to speak with other participants. P

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The group artists can be seen as a bit different in that they are deeply involved in real politics through discourse. What do you think of the social role of art? Park I consider the social role of artists limited. As mentioned in the answer to the question 1, art was ‘meta art’ obsessive in defining what art is. Listen to the City tries to define the external conditions of art more freely rather than creating new aesthetic beauty as previous artists did. I also consider neo-liberalism in contemporary art made artists more dependent on galleries, curators, and critics. The artist group is a device for artists to contemplate and express themselves more voluntarily un- der such conditions. It can be said Listen to the City assumes the role of enabling the general public to meet artists and enhance their aesthetic sense. Each artist is different socially, so attempting to generalize them might be dogmatism.

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While in previous work Listen to the City directly revealed their intention through the documentary format, field trips, and an- nouncing statements, the Exchange City Project, held at Space Hamilton, alluded implicitly to the city, expanding its view to other cities (Liverpool). I wonder if any changes have been made for this new project.

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Park The Exchange City Project began by questioning if a city can be seen as an entity. According to Jaques Lacan children feel their bodies are fragmentized, but after going through the mirror stage they realize their bod- ies are a united one. What is the mirror to reflect a city? Listen to the City in Seoul and Static in Liverpool intended to remove false images and reveal a true nature by functioning like a mirror. The two groups asked those who have never visited the counterpart city for their impressions. (What’s your impression of Seoul? / What’s your impression of Liverpool?)