Seoul Institute of the Arts Digital Art Creative Workshop Apartment Archiving Interactive Installation
March 2020 - July 2020
In a redeveloped area where everyone has left,
I entered an apartment with a vacant sticker on it.
Inside, I found diaries and a TV left behind by someone.
As I flipped through the diaries,
memories related to the apartment were played back on the TV.
The ten diaries seem to have been written by someone
who spent their childhood in the apartment.
They talk about moving into the apartment,
drawing a map of the neighborhood in their own way,
attending a piano academy in the shopping district,
playing hide and seek,
and other ordinary yet joyful memories of their youth.
In the final diary, there's an email sent to a friend
who left the apartment ahead of them as redevelopment approaches:
'Our apartment is now entering redevelopment too.
I wished our beloved scenery would stay forever,
but it seems that nothing is eternal in the face of time.'
How will the one for whom the apartment is a hometown remember it?
Now, as a concrete structure facing demolition,
it's time to reminisce about the apartment as a home bearing traces of life.
The Old Apartment as Seen by an Apartment Kid
In Korean society, apartments are often interpreted in terms of
capital and investment value, but for us, apartments were our homes.
Even if someone were to call it a matchbox-like cement building,
inside it holds the time of our growth.
Before the apartments disappear,
how can we remember them?
We want to retrace our memories along
with the concrete and universal traces
and leave behind the meaning of 'home' within the apartments.