Photos posted for DMZ Art Festival Project: “Entrenched Thought”
Posted: July 30, 2011 Filed under: Casual 2 CommentsMany thoughts to work through after a month in Korea taking thousands of photos of my art installation, “Entrenched Thought” along with street photography. Aside from the political tension, I was genuinely perturbed by Seoul’s rise to fame as the plastic surgery capital of the world and the street photography I shot looks at this question. Hope to post those another time.
Here I post a few photos of my project “Entrenched Thought” at the DMZ Art Festival this summer:
You can see more photos here:
http://flickr.com/venema
a drawn line is naked thought 
I really enjoyed the images sent back from this project – some of them raise intriguing parallels and suggestions and others simply put me in mind of, on the one hand, archaeological digs I’ve taken part in and, on the other, stone walls I’ve helped to build. ‘Entrenched Thought’ – so it’s a pun? More than that – the strength/power of books and knowledge? The books seem so sad and bring to mind stories friends told me of having to burn their beloved books to heat the water for a shower while trying to survive living through a freezing winter without power. The books’ shapes, the forms they take together, their content, their condition – what do we read into it all?!
Thanks so much for comments Sue. The idea of the project is to raise those questions. It can be read on multiple levels. While books are like beloved friends, they are also mere material, and not the ideas themselves. Do we overvalue the stuff that we collect? Thousands of books in storage and on our shelves that we never read, or will never return to. Are they more or less sad than the ones that lay here, in this project? What does it mean for two nations, North and South Korea, who have been at a stalemate for over 50 years to maintain the entrenched border between them? Some ideas have to go to the dustbin if anyone is to move forward. Perhaps most of us could do with a lot less clutter in our lives and use books for more useful things like holding up the dam so that we can walk through to the other side. … If you read some of my previous notes, the wall runs perpendicular to the DMZ and so is not a barrier like the border is, but a passage.