Jody Chan + Myung-Sun Kim

During this residency, Jody Chan and Myung-Sun Kim will be exploring a new collaborative project focused on the echoes and reverberations of lineage. Some of the questions that propel this exploration include: how do individual and collective histories operate on us, and on our relationships? How do we hold our lineages in our bodies, and what activates that cellular memory? With what instruments does ancestral memory speak—language, shadow, movement, sound? We come to this project inspired by the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Don Mee Choi, Victoria Chang, and many others—how they use ambiguity, fragmentation, and formal innovation to build alternative histories within their pages. We come with care, and carefulness, around the methods and ethics of working with spirits and hauntings. We come with curiosity about the historical overlaps between Korean and Chinese systems of writing, and what these etymologies might have to tell us about our intersecting histories. In our creative research process, we will connect each of our own multidisciplinary artistic practices, drawing on poetry, sculpture, drumming, score-making, and other modes of expression to investigate shape and sound as portals to these questions of embodiment, language, inheritance, belonging.