David Bergé

Ghosts of Modernity (working title)

I would like to use the Saari Residence to work on the postproduction of Ghosts of Modernity, multi-screen moving image installation for which the material will be shot in Korea over the summer of 2017. The residency would allow me time and space to work with the material and conceptually prepare the editing, which will follow in Belgium. Idea is to edit the recordings in cumulative loops: every time a new loop starts, new information joins the existing loop. The installation deals with a specific phenomenon in Seoul, South Korea, where due to sudden urban density and city expansion, modernity relentlessly clashes into wild nature. The installation aims to reveal time and space at this merciless borderline. To research the specificities of these sites, I will spent time in situ and develop and perform a silent Walk Piece, a performative research format I have been working with since 2008. I take small groups of people for a 100 minute guided walk in complete silence along these sites. The Walk Piece enhances body awareness and presence to the locations where in a later fase, I’ll record time with a film crew.Next to the impressive physicality of these spaces, the work is also a reference to the political history of Korea. Due to the Japanese occupation, the devision of the country and a civil war until 1953, Korea was deprived of it’s ‘own’ modernisation which echoes in the development the country went through after putting itself on the global map with the 1988 Olympic Games.

The work aims to find a form to represent or reenact – in all its senses – the ‘performative knowledge’ of a spaces like the above: its tactile qualities, as much as its historical layers. Capturing a glimpse of time and space to thus embrace the global in its smallest detail.