Browse
Alice Ko: In your work, the myth of Bari as a space of mediation re-evaluating different histories, past and present. It addresses an anchor or ethos that would allow for a structural overhaul – yielding a history that goes beyond the dynamics of state-to-state discourse and the division of modern borders. Could you elaborate more on your interest and approach of Bari, and how you adopt it as the major structure of the work, by interpreting the three deaths in the Bari Mythology?
Jane Jin Kaisen: “Community of Parting” was compelled by a need to engage borders otherwise, after interfacing with the mechanism of borders as they manifest as gender bias, and in the geopolitical enforcements of borders, including the division of Korea and its Cold War polarities. I was drawn to the Myth of Bari, not so much as a literal myth, but as a sentiment, as a figuration for how borders can be approached differently. One could think of Bari as a threshold epistemology and a way of mediating at the thresholds, not only in regard to geopolitical borders, but, more fundamentally, as a way of being and knowing that diffuses conventional distinctions between self and other and asks us to reconsider what comes to count as knowledge.
Two border crossings came to inform “Community of Parting.” The first happened in 2015, when I participated in an international women’s delegation which crossed the DMZ, the border dividing North and South Korea. The second occurred in 2018, in the form of a shamanic ritual of recalling my deceased grandparents, whose patriarchal norms played a decisive role in my adoption. The ritual was performed by shaman Koh Sunahn of Jeju Island, South Korea. While these two border crossings differ in character and scale, they produced a similar sense of spatial and temporal disjuncture and prompted a fundamental questioning of the matrixes of power that conventional notions of borders and translation rely on and sustain. At the same time, they opened up for considerations potential ways of establishing relations across borders, and this was when I began to think more deeply about the Myth of Bari, which became central to “Community of Parting,” both as a narrative devised and as a compositional principle for it.
AK: In “Community of Parting,” the landscape acts like a location of thematic subject matter: the various references, characters, and scenes are all related, in one way or another, to the history of Korea and Jeju Island itself. On the other hand, the geographical landscape and scenes of nature act as a sort of structure, almost a metaphor of time and memory. The landscape is also a silent witness to the history of Jeju Island. For instance, the scene of the community of Haenyeo, on Jeju island, which is profoundly connected with the sea, seems to have addressed a spirit of goddess mythology and and organic democracy around the seaside, extending from the colonial past to now. What does incorporating this scene in the film mean to you?
JJ: The landscape, the natural environment and other living beings, have a strong presence in “Community of Parting.” They are agents and assume characters of their own. In that sense, there are no clear distinctions between the human and the natural environment in “Community of Parting.” The piece is also cyclically configured around images of landscapes and recurring shamanic rituals and chants. The film begins and ends with aerial images of the ocean as a metaphor of time that is both incessant and continuously transforming. Integrating nature and the natural environment is a way of gesturing towards a different kind of temporality and suggesting a different way of orienting. I am glad that you bring up the scene with the Haenyeo in the ritual by the beach on Jeju Island, which concludes with the women making an offering to the sea. It is an example, I think, of this threshold epistemology that Bari evokes, which has to do with conviviality and embracing the complexity of reality, an enactment of what I have called and the ethics and aesthetics of memory and mutual recognition. The scene for me encompasses at once life and lived experience, or the present moment that we are situated in, but at the same time, the memories of historical violence are embodied in the expressions of the divers and part of the ritual. For me, the scene also captures a non-divisive approach to the environment, one of cohabitation, whereby nature is not an exterior force but the co-constitutive part of an ecosystem.
AK: As Pakistan poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz once said, “No one can avoid the fate of becoming strangers after crossing a border. When a border crosses a land, all that was hitherto familiar becomes strange.” Following up the previous discussion, the experience that you mentioned of your trip to North Korea in 2015, when you crossed the DMZ into South Korea, seems to have been a particularly significant event for you. Could you elaborate its influence on your practices and thoughts of the space of separation, discrimination and exclusion, generated by modernization?
JJ: Since the early 2000s I have been invested in legacies of war and the division of Korea through participation in different transnational adoptee and diasporic communities, as well as through working with the legacy of the Jeju April Third Massacre, and the consequences of US militarism in Korea. Still, taking part in the delegation crossing the DMZ had a fundamental impact. In intensity, the experience resonated with the experience of reuniting with my birth family in Korea many years prior. It struck me as a transgression of a psychic and physical border that different forces had sought to uphold, and compelled a fundamental rethinking of what I had perceived as knowing and had taken for granted.
Being at the border and experiencing how it resonates traumatically on both sides was a sensation of coming into contact with the division as a primal scene that has conditioned my subjectivity, and been a source of my artistic inquiry, a division that also continues to reverberate on the scale of global politics. In the end we were able to cross the physical border, but it turned out to be much more difficult to cross the psychic border of suspicion and antagonism erected and sustained by Cold War logics. The experience prompted a more sustained engagement with borders, seeing the necessity of not merely approaching these questions and theorizing them from afar, but immersing myself in situations where the violent and traumatic effects of borders have tangible consequences, while simultaneously challenging my own presumptions. My liminal passage also involved a more nuanced consideration of how the durational impasse of Korea’s division continues to reverberate in and beyond Korea, since it tends to be interlocked in preconceived biases, or what I have elsewhere called ‘regimes of translation.’ Separation, discrimination and exclusion are essential functions of border thinking and of colonial modernity. These mechanisms prevail in the present in very tangible ways; for example, through the enforcement of geopolitical borders. But as an artist, I was also interested in how border thinking produces spatial and temporal hierarchies and effects how we come to perceive reality, and how, through experimental aesthetic forms, these might be renegotiated and destabilized.
AK: That type of back and forth seems to create a space out of a linear timeline. “When a shaman calls back the dead to our time, it means that the performer has infinite freedom regarding time.”Relatedly,“In Bari’s death, multiple times are brought together.” (“Community of Parting”) In this work, your historical references and composition go both backwards in time and forwards. This back-and-forth seems to create a space out of a linear timeline. “When a shaman calls back the dead to our time, it means that the performer has infinite freedom regarding time.”…“In Bari’s death, multiple times are brought together.” The role of modern images here is, instead of a reproduction, another kind of psychic, unseen and yet interactive matrix. Were you actively attempting to create this kind of multi-temporality in the work? Film as a medium plays a crucial part in your practices, could you share with us why you choose to utilize moving images as your artistic practices? And what do you think about the relationship between the site and video?
JJ: Yes, time is an essential preoccupation both in “Community of Parting” and in my other works and it is approached and renegotiated in several ways. A violent function of colonial modernity is the erection of borders in time by which certain subjects, knowledge and histories have been deemed backwards, or untimely, and of the past. “Community of Parting” is configured as a multi-scalar, non-linear and layered. It incorporates various filmic modalities ranging from documentary to observational cinema, to essayistic, poetic, and performative passages. Rather than being linearly progressing, the film is cyclically evolving. Thinking with the shamanic and the notion of Bari as a threshold sentiment, I used different devices, such as the integration of archive material, shamanic chants and poetry, to invoke the past, while also employing non-diegetic montage and juxtaposition to bring together multiple times and to diffuse spatial and temporal segregation that joins together multiple geographies, experiences and events. In the composition, I paid a lot of attention to rhythm and pacing. Thinking with the shamanic, I was interested in devising a filmic form that in certain moments attains mediumistic qualities, whereby film, both as media and as medium, becomes a multi-sensorial experience and is able to transport or channel the viewer through different states of consciousness.
AK: The title, “Community of Parting,” is derived from the book of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, Woman, I Do Poetry, which speaks to many experiences related to exiles, diaspora and the people who do not belong to a certain community. What turned your attention outward to these wider areas of investigation? In the film, a kind of intimacy that is constituted through an interweaving of these various different experiences and stories, not only on Jeju Island, but in South Korea, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, China, Germany and the United States, seems to show how they are all somehow connected across time and space, and are part of this large stream of historical processes. Could you elaborate on your approach in the film, reflecting the parting in different ways?
JJ: The work of Kim Hyesoon, and her approach to the myth of Bari, has been a big inspiration to me. She is one of the voice narrators in “Community of Parting” and she also recites her writing. I was very drawn to her line, “Community of Parting,” because it encompasses several central meanings of the film: the relationship between the living and the dead, the gathering and dispersal that is integral to the shamanic, and also the notion of diaspora, or of subjects who for different historical circumstances have had to part and become dispersed. While the “Community of Parting” engages Korea’s division, it refuses simplified nationalist reunification narratives and is told from a decentered perspective by subjects who rest uneasily within nation-state configurations and patriarchal norm systems. This includes my own diasporic subjectivity, but also that of many of the other voice narrators of the film, who speak about experiences of dispersal from sites such as Japan, Kazakhstan, Germany and the United States. Taken together, all the speaking subjects in the film come to constitute a ‘community of parting,’ not as a fixed community or entity, but rather as a becoming-community, one that is not static but that continuously transforms and disperses.
In many ways, “Community of Parting” is also configured as a journey and as a decolonial reckoning with the experience of abandonment. One of the great forces of the myth of Bari, to me, lies in how it reconfigures the notion of abandonment from one of victimization to one of agency and mediating capacity. “Community of Parting” is loosely framed around the notion of Bari´s multiple deaths, whereby abandonment as social death is gradually reframed from a position of marginalization, to one of actively confronting mechanisms that produce borders, to finally embracing a different notion of self-hood, one that is at once a type of self-loss or letting go of the ego, in order to embrace a larger intersubjective self, while recognizing that knowledge and embodiment of abandonment is a prerequisite for being able to mediate from the thresholds.
AK: The shaman, Koh Sunahn, is in the film dedicated to the memory of the Jeju April Third Massacre, and her family was victimized during this period of time. The role of Koh presents a position of transforming these traumatic experiences into healing and reconciling, through a reunion of living and death. This also has been mentioned in the film, in a line that states, ‘to become a shaman, you have to experience a process of abandonment, yourself must be gone so the dead person can enter you.’ In a sense, the shaman plays an important role of mediating and translating the traumatized emotions and resentment of tragedies. Could you share your encounter with Koh Sunahn, and your view on Shamanism and its particular relationship with the history of Jeju?
JJ: I met shaman Koh Sun Ahn in 2011, when I was working on Reiterations of Dissent, concerning the Jeju April Third Massacre. We established a special bond because she was the head shaman of my grandparents´ hometown. My grandfather was her elementary school teacher and my grandmother, who worked as a diver, was a regular client of her shrine. I was also compelled by Shaman Koh Sun Ahn’s practice, because of her commitment to the Jeju Massacre, during which her father was killed. She was particularly skillful in orally delivering and transmitting historical knowledge, not only of the massacre and other marginalized memories, but a whole cosmology connected to the land and the sea.I have mainly experienced shamanism as it is practiced on Jeju Island. I was drawn to the shamanic as an oral and embodied knowledge practice that is intimately connected to memory and to the realm of the social. Shamans in Jeju have played a significant role in commemorating the Jeju April Third Massacre, and I think their commitment to marginalized memory is also part of what makes the shamans of Jeju retain an important societal role, not just as healers, but as a type of historians, as carriers and mediators of vernacular memory.
AK: On the other hand, you also hold a similar position toward creating a passage of connection, via a way of the mnemonic, and in approaching concepts of history, narration, and memory. Hence, translation becomes a set of understandings and negotiations from culture, language and racialized bodies in your practices. What do you think of translation as a method to re-narrate history, and to produce a way of healing and empowerment?
JJ: In making “Community of Parting,” I was negotiating the mediumistic qualities of film, film´s ability to register life and lived experience, and its ability to connect past and present, by bringing different temporal relations into view. Enacting the role of filmmaker is also to enact the role of mediator or translator, and translation is a concept I have been very engaged with. The word translation derives from the Latin word trānslātiō, meaning ‘to carry across,’ or ‘to bear across,’ and has traditionally been understood as the neutral and seamless transfer of content from one culture to another, pertaining to the field of linguistics. However, translation often creates and sustains borders, and many post -and decolonial thinkers have pointed out how translation has ramifications far beyond the confines of textual interpretation. As part of the colonial machinery of mapping and classifying, translation has functioned to break down barriers in time and space, but also to erect new divisions, borders, and radical forms of exclusion and subjugation, through processes of erasure, othering and containment. In this way, translation has served as a tool to justify hierarchies between times and spaces, peoples, and cultures.
Yet, although translation has contributed to radical forms of violence, I have also been drawn to translation as a site of potentiality and resistance through art. As a form of mediation, art is inherently translational and has the potential for reconfiguring dominant representational forms, and pushing the boundaries of how we perceive, and fundamentally, what we come to understand as knowledge. Elsewhere I have talked about the notion of “translating otherwise,” which for me has to do with contesting dominant frames, and while acknowledging their visceral effects, contouring alternative genealogies and modes of perception through alternative aesthetic forms. Images and narratives structure what is seeable and sayable. In that way, I think art that translates otherwise has a potential for questioning power structures and generating forms of recognition, healing and empowerment.