Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Figure 1. Okin Collective, OperationFor Something Black

and Hot, 2012, 18 minutes, 30 seconds, single-channel video
(production still). Courtesy of the artist

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 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 Collectives 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 perspec-
tives. 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 shanty
town 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

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doi 10.1215/02705346-3662057 2016 by Camera Obscura
Published by Duke University Press

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be demolished when the collectives members visited one of their

colleagues who lived there in 2009. Witnessing the rapid urban
beautification process that involved the forceful eviction of the
apartment complexs tenants, Jin, Kim, and Yi agreed to work col-
lectively to excavate and bring into relief the conflicting tempo-
ral 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 complexs state as a precarious
site of impending demolition. Okin Collectives members explain
in reference to their formation, At the first 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 return-
ing there and find some ways to talk about our feelings and the
situation.1 This description of Okins 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 (Okin-
dong 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 impro-
vised rap performances, and the collective posted photo documen-
tation of the complex on its blog. In 2010, Okin organized an exhi-
bition entitled Open Site. This event was held in the complex amid
its ongoing destruction, and it transformed dilapidated sites, such
as the complexs 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 Okins members as well as those of sev-
eral fellow artists, took collaboration and participation as its two
operating schemes, thus enabling visitors to experience in sensory
and affective ways the sites precariousness, the persistence of the
memories associated with it, and the conflict between the residents

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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 tem-
porary 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 complexs former occupants and the geopolitical tension
caused by the areas destruction. Likewise, in Bowling for Okin (Jin
Shiu and Yi Joungmin, 2010) Okins members placed two bowling
balls that they found in a demolished building on the complexs
rooftop. They then invited visitors to perform a bowling game as
an act of embodying the ephemeral dreams of the complexs for-
mer residents, an act that would fictionally sublimate the politics of
memory into an aesthetic play. These collaborative open projects,
which aimed to create a dynamic exchange between past and pres-
ent, 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 chal-
lenge cognitive, social, or political conventions.2 Since the demoli-
tion of the complex, Okin Collective has expanded their collabora-
tive 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, Okins emphasis on participation and collabo-
ration, 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 ges-
ture toward the audience all pertain to the repertoires of the now-
famous relational aesthetics proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud.3
This overlap demonstrates the groups aspiration to establish its
projects as a shared world, a provisional community of the audi-
ence whose common activities aim to renew relations between art

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and life. While Okins 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 rela-
tional aesthetics previously practiced in the Okin Apartments has
been expanded into the form of the moving image since 2012.
That is, Okins aim to engender the visitors 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 per-
formances. 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 wit-
ness how the performances audiences are invited to practice sym-
bolic 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 Negris use of the concept, a space
in which the multitudes communicative activities produce both
individual and collective bodies as the basis for a renewed under-
standing of their common social and cultural conditions.4
OperationFor Something Black and Hot (2012) is a single-
channel video that documents Okin Collectives performance by
the same title that was set in an unnamed contemporary society
faced with a fictional environmental crisis, recalling the Fuku-
shima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 (fig. 1). In this
diegetic space, the press is so controlled by the societys authority
that its citizens are exposed to a media blackout, which prevents
them from escaping the impending unidentified 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-g ymnastics (gi means energy in Korean), a fictional
exercise. Set on a vacant rooftop of a building, which recalls Okins
previous projects based on the apartment complex, the video pre

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Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe 145

sents three performers drills involving gi-g ymnastics 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 voices 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 minds breath, and roll up your tail-
bone, 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, Okins members studied a series of instruc-
tional 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-g ymnastics. To be sure, the groups interest in
the codified and ritualized aspect of social gestures attests to the
tradition of conceptual art and appropriation art, or culture jam-
ming, as a subgenre of alternative/activist media practices that
mine mainstream culture to critique it.5 The newly composed
drills present highly codified and choreographed postures, which
aim to turn the political and affective dimensions of both the gym-
nastics and the survival instructions into a new collective, partici-
patory experience. On the one hand, the individualized aspect of
self-training and meditation in gi-g ymnastics is transformed into
a collective aesthetic activity, one that is corporeal and through
which audiences are able to produce a collective flesh that embod-
ies the precariousness of the catastrophe as their common condi-
tion of living. On the other hand, the groups 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-

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146 Camera Obscura

posed of long shots taken with a fixed 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 rooftops
nearly vacant setting to extend the state of crisis in the diegetic
space to the viewers contemporary social experience. The footage
of the Fukushima disaster thats inserted in the videos 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 Okins performance on the streets of Barcelona, Spain.
Okins members provided passersby with an excerpt from Miguel
de Cervantess Don Quixote (part 1, 1605), a conversation between
Don Quixote, who declares that he will fight the giants, and San-
cho 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, includ-
ing which character they preferredDon Quixote the idealist or
Sancho Panza the pragmatic realistand what the giants (wind-
mills) symbolize. Resembling the process of actors auditioning
on the street for a fictional play based on the novel, the resulting
video presents a variety of performances by the interviewees, high-
lighting their different verbal and gestural acting styles. In this
sense, the performances correspond to Okins 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 renegoti-
ating the relationship between the two. Also, the videos position-
ing of the members as interviewers, as well as the members use of
a microphone and handheld camera, fit into the participatory
mode of documentary in Bill Nicholss categorization, in that the
members serve as agitators who trigger social actors to make a par-
ticular action and change their situation.6 This mode thus echoes
Okins objective to create an open form across different mediums
and settings.

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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 nota-
ble in the video is the commonality among the ways in which the
participants understand and embody Don Quixote. The interview-
ees 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 eco-
nomic situations. The interviewee-performers encompass not sim-
ply 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 conflicts
that are locally distinct but have compelling correspondences on a
global scale. One Chilean tourist compares the giants Don Quix-
ote faces to the political and economic inequality that has gov-
erned Chile, considering his fight to be an allegory of a middle-
class strike as a trigger of socialist revolution. The tourists 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
fictional 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 videos documentation of the
performances presents another idea of the commons, the multi-
tudes utopian aspiration for a better society that they believe is
allegorically embedded within the story of Don Quixote. The par-
ticipants all love Don Quixotes spirit of adventure, his bravery, and
his keen awareness of fighting against the windmill-giants as his
destiny. Simultaneously foregrounding the allegorical understand-
ing 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 peoples lin-
guistic competence to be launched as weapons or seductions, exer-

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cising their weight, striking force.7 The interviews function as a

device for engendering the participants association of their per-
formance of the story with their awareness of the here and now.
Okins practice of gleaning the interviewees common uto-
pian aspiration from their different performances of Don Quixote
suggests, too, the groups conception of collectivity as one that
unties community from its essentialized link to a unified and uni-
versal identity. The sense of collectivity proposed by the diverse
array of performances based on the same story of Don Quixote
fits into an alternative idea of community that is not premised on
race, nation, sexuality, and gender. Rather, this collectivity pro-
duces more open, fluid, 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, Okins 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 Okins idea of collectiv-
ity presented in Don Quijote del carre dispenses with any consider-
ation of the differences in gender and sexuality. What Nancys and
Agambens 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
Okins 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 aspira-
tion. 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-

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Invitation to Perform Utopia and Catastrophe 149

ent identities: as a tenderhearted young woman; a strong, middle-

aged 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, Okins videos can be read as projects that fore-
ground and explore an array of interrelated ideas and issues that
revolve around collectivity. Taking peoples 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 peoples performative prac-
tices, which produce both a common affective understanding of
the present and a shared envisioning of the future as the overlap-
ping temporalities of collectivity, inviting viewers to perform catas-
trophe and utopia in ways that extend the audiences play into the
sociopolitical and economic dimensions of their lives. In so doing,
Okins video works emblematize the aesthetics as politics that
Jacques Rancire reads as a notable tendency of global contem-
porary art that aspires to bridge and traverse the artistic and the
non-artistic in collaborative projects, an aesthetics that consists of
reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible which defines the
common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and
objects [and] to render visible what had not been.9

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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 Rel, 2002), 2548.

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), 11524.

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 Rancire, Aesthetics as Politics, Aesthetics and Its

Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity, 2009), 25.

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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
Documentarys Expanded Fields: New Media, New Platforms, and
the Documentary.

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