Tomorrow’s Myths is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “2086: Together How?,” the Korean Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia curated by Soik Jung and Kyong Park, featuring contributions by Alice Bucknell, Federico Campagna, Serang Chung, Yunjeong Han, Hyewon Lee, and M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi.
Myths are relatively simple stories that, through the use of metaphor and other narrative devices, cut to the core of what it means to be human. Their messages are eternal, and through increasingly diverse storytelling practices, are often shared and passed down through the ages. By providing wider narratives that everyone can relate to, myths teach us about ourselves, about each other. They allow us to understand the bigger picture, and feel connected to greater significance and meaning. While new myths can emerge from the most quotidian practices and everyday habits of contemporary life, ancient ones are continually reinterpreted and contextualized within the present. Myths often operate on the foundations of non-normative, non-modern, non-scientific, non-rational epistemologies and cosmologies. Many myths teach us about death, disappointment, and destruction, while others teach us about love, about compassion, about harmony. Myths allow us to imagine another time, another way of being and living, and create bridges from the here and now to the there and then.
The 2023 Korean Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale seeks to address how we might live together in the year when our global population is supposed to peak: 2086. The project supposes that we must have a biocultural revolution if we are going to survive the unimaginable levels of environmental crises to come and that have already begun. This will entail overcoming a number of fundamental questions facing present-day society rooted in historical dialectics, such as: Why are we so “isolated” when we are supposed to be so “connected” with the globalization of information, finance, commodities, and even culturally? Why are we so insecure about our future when many of us are living at unprecedented levels of wealth, technologically, mobility, and consumption? How did we get to this point of abundance with so much absence? How can we bridge the contradictions that are driving us to extinction?
Focusing on three communities in South Korea (Gunsan, Gyeonggi, and East Incheon), “2086” will imagine more empathic, reflective, and circumscribed ways of living. Here, we are interested in exploring the role, the significance, and the potential of myth within this narrative, conceptual, and thematic framework of survival. What might the myths be that are created in 2086, after the biocultural revolution? What myths might we create, or even be necessary to bring such about such transformations? How can we understand myth as an operative and creative force, one that is both intimately familiar and immediately accessible?
Tomorrow’s Myths is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “2086: Together How?,” the Korean Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia curated by Soik Jung and Kyong Park.
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