The Refrain (2015) By Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson in collaboration with Aya Hanabusa and Maurizio Lazzarato 4 channel HD video, 6 channel audio, 65min Vitrine with research material Wall text & Map
The Refrain takes the viewer on a journey from Okinawa to Jeju Island to mainland Korea, itinerating a journey that includes the Henoko Beach protests against the expansion of a US Marine Corps base; Jeju Island’s traditional women divers, it’s brutal history of Japanese colonialism and subsequent anti-communist massacres, and the protests against the construction of a Naval Base in the village of Gangjong; the propagandistic War Museum in Seoul; an NGO that works with women working in the sex industry around US military bases and a field of abandoned anti-tank structures near the DMZ that has been transformed into a gigantic garden by the local community.
This 4 channel video installation is composed of 15 “refrains” recorded on Jeju island, and in Paju, Seoul and Uijeongbu city in South Korea, and on Okinawa and Iwaishima Islands in Japan. The refrains connect Korea with Japan along the Ryuku islands, mirroring the Southern Chinese coast, and follow the ongoing protest movements against militarization in South Korea and Japan in light of the so-called “Asian Pivot” by the US military.
These durational protest movements have created a space which allows for a different kind of subjectivity to emerge through music and song, interrupting capitalism’s military industrial pact by remembering and resisting bodies, by a living, non-assimilable and non-virtual continuity that collectively constructs a new cartography.
Produced for the exhibition Interrupted Survey – Fractured Modern Mythologies curated by Anselm Franke. ACC, Gwangju, South Korea.