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"Oi! Your Shadow's over the line!"

Part 2 Project 2013
Ja Kyung Kim
Architectural Association London | UK
No sign, no cars, no lights – a no man’s land between North and South Korea. Here lies a desolate landscape, which lasted for 60 years and whose only inhabitants are wild animals and danger.

The project proposed a landscape as a ritual of actions and activities developed by the Korean women of both sides of the borderline, orchestrated along the time as a parody of a military game. The project is an activator of processes of negotiation against the immature attitudes in the conflict between South and North Korea and is situated in the DMZ (demilitarized zone), right in between the two mirrored cities and the two huge flag poles, one in each country, constructed as an absurd game of geopolitical power and violence.

Playing with the secondary and silent role of women in both Korean societies, a series of actions and games which are designed and held between women of the two Koreas that pave the way for a hypothetical secret negotiation between leaders. This negotiation is preceded by a non-verbal communication and cooperation between both sides of the border that begins with sending from the South construction drawings to assemble vehicles from obsolete weaponry able to locate and disable mines in the DMZ.
In addition to the political signs of gigantic dimensions with out of context messages, drawn by vehicles by planting seeds and watering the demilitarized zone, negotiation takes place in a delirious beauty salon. High over the border and critically emulating the immature game of construction of giant flagpoles and phantom villas on both sides of the border, the scene of the new secret talks is a slender mast with a space covered by inflatable, operated and erected from the ground. This piece, supposedly secretly assembled by women, is operated through two markets which introduce the first signs of Exchange and allow hiding, or showing, what happens there above. When the strange inflatable flower closes, the final deal is closed, watered by alcohol and enlivened by K-Pop music: men can finally talk and give free rein to his feminine side, while enjoying beauty treatments.

Ja Kyung Kim

Tutor(s)


2013
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