Mobile Scenarios for the Metamorphic Beings

Curated by Juhyun Cho
Produced by Drifting Curriculum (ARKO International Joint Fund, 2021–2022 Korea-Netherlands International Exchange and Cooperation Program)
In partnership with Framer Framed
With support from Arts Council Korea, DutchCulture

Mobile Scenarios for the Metamorphic Beings is an exhibition that presents research contents of Drifting Curriculum’s joint research project over the past year produced in three scenarios. This research/collaboration project, with keywords of “drift”, “migration”, and “metamorphosis”, explores the relationship between technology and the ecological environment under the theme of “Anthropocene Marine Space and Post-colonialism”.

The mobile scenario, consisting of three completely different scenes in collaboration with three teams of researchers and artists, is a niche in the history of colonial imperialism in the Age of Discovery. It closely links the accidental drift of Dutch East India Company’s explorer Hendrik Hamel and his party, stranded on the coast of Jeju Island in 1653, to the political and ecological problems arising in the present Anthropocene marine space and to the planetary-level disasters that occurred in various time and space and the countless possibilities of futures.

The contemporary speculative landscape that unfolds as we drift and move into the fictitious marine space between the Netherlands and Korea is a space of our lives where climate change, fear of infection, and threats of human existence are common beyond specific disaster events. Those who live there constantly change and reorganize their position as boundaries for viruses, migrants, refugees, Asians, others, and non-human individuals.

Humanity, which is drifting away from the state of the settlement will have an identity as refugees, migrants, and minorities on this planet and experiences anxiety, fear, isolation, and frustration in the face of survival problems. Inhabitants of the planet Earth, whose hegemony in the previous world has been lost, are constantly in a state of “metamorphosis” by changing their positions frequently in new relationships with other beings.

The mobile scenario, which unfolds unstable, self-contradictory, and temporary events in the global environment, land, sea, and base after the pandemic in weightless time and space where historical time and literary imagination are intertwined, predicts a “totally different world” for the coming future, neither dystopia nor utopia.

Scene #1. Tangerine Dream Museum
Research Scenario: Juhyun Cho / Artist: Hyunseon Kang

Scene #2. Ecology for the Non-Future
Research Scenario / Artists: Unmake Lab

Scene #3. Between Mokpo and Wageningen
Research Scenario: Chihyung Jeon / Artists: Cheolwoong Sim, Hanna Park