Dongducheon's Camp Casey, from a trip with KEEP in 2002. Under the gaze of Marxist political economy, some places are almost purely allegorical.
South Korean military camptowns, the settlements that were first built around the imperial Japanese military occupying Korea and then occupied and expanded by the US military, might be one such political allegory of a place.
Ostensibly, the camptown is a type of border zone that serves as a buffer between military and civilian life. It hosts a familiar theatre of unequal exchanges between a foreign military and a native economy constructed around their consumptive desires. From a feminist perspective, the camptowns are a non-stop carnival of horrors where patriarchy, nationalism, and militarism cavort together in the commodification of female (and sometimes male) bodies. Whether they have arrived voluntarily or have been trafficked from the countryside or abroad, these women inevitably begin from a position of debt bondage, and many surmount the initial debt only to begin paying their way through their gendered responsibilities, as daughters, as sisters, as mothers, for someone else's education and upbringing. Generally, military camptowns seem to be the perfect narrative vehicle for demonstrating how brute military power (primitive accumulation) safeguards the interests of capital and imperialist designs.
Sometimes, however, it is precisely this allegorical vision that smooths over the social and political complexities and dynamics that would offer some way out of this dead end, for the people who are the most affected. If a place becomes so allegorical as to become an abstract abomination, it is tempting to propose projects of erasure to ease the nationalist sense of outrage and shame. At the national scale, calling for the withdrawal of foreign bases is definitely one kind of solution - a polemically clear rallying point that identifies occupation as toxic, as crippling, as the root rotting at the core of the dead city, the city as one endless crime scene.
But people live here. The horror of the abstraction does not mitigate the facts, the routines, and the quotidian desires that stir upon waking, to open shops, sell cigarettes, food, booze, phone calls, games, clothes, to US soldiers. People live here. For some Amerasian children, this is the only place they can live, rejected by a general cultural climate of xenophobia around such human reminders of occupation or that other nationalist trope, the 'bad women,' the 'fallen women.'
Maybe this is what this project at the New Museum is about: Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision. It excites me because the process of research and exploration seems to ask questions more than propose plans, and most of all, the artists and residents, in dialogue, highlight the importance of space, of bodies, of walking. It pokes at buildings, it doesn't let the haunted houses just be, or the fields remain blank, or the cemetery remain untended. It fights impending bulldozers with grief, and seeds. I am going to check it out this Thursday and see how the luminous text translates into form, into an experience for museumgoers like me.
Detail from Discoplan, by artist Sangdon Kim, Insa Art Space,in which residents propel seeds over the barbed wire at Camp Nimble.
