FROM WHAT (통일T’ONGIL) I FORGOTTEN (2023)

FROM WHAT (통일T’ONGIL) I FORGOTTEN is a moving poem project and is a part of a larger working series. The film opens a liminal space of memories and speculation. The project was a response to my grandmother's passing—a gesture to memorialize the forgotten memories that were held within her silence. The work is a performance of my grandmother's yearning for a home in the northern part of Korea, from where she, along with my father and aunt crossed over the 38th parallel partition. The moving image and text happen in dreaming—interconnecting my grandmother and my own yearnings and desires for home— for my grandmother, a home in a location; and for me, a home within her.

The assemblage of text is coordinated through a point of reference, the two-tailed dragon lady, who holds the memory of before and after the scathing demarcations of the 38th parallel. T’ongil is a term that is used refers to the reunification of the country, a longing that my family has and still keeps in their hoping

Performer: Estefania Cho; Hair and Sound Production: Sev Croxie

End Notes/2024

The film begins in amnesia, one that belongs to

my grandmother, father, and aunt who can only recall

fragments of crossing the 38th parallel division, after the signing of the

Armistice Treaty. My aunt and father were only children at the time...

their memory recalls brief glimpses of the journey.

My grandmother did not/would not share much.

She forgot details of the journey, including how long it took to walk

from the peak of the peninsula to the southern designation of the peninsula.

End Notes/2024

The film begins in amnesia, one that belongs to

my grandmother, father, and aunt who can only recall

fragments of crossing the 38th parallel division, after the signing of the

Armistice Treaty. My aunt and father were only children at the time...

their memory recalls brief glimpses of the journey.

My grandmother did not/would not share much.

She forgot details of the journey, including how long it took to walk

from the peak of the peninsula to the southern designation of the peninsula.

She shared little about her past, forgetting her experiences under

the Japanese Occupation; the language and her mandated Japanese name;

her family in the northern peninsula; her relationship with my grandfather,

and the hardships and troubling decisions she had to make to survive.

I share this afterward as a reminder that the images and

narrative assembled in this form is a practice of searching

for stories that are/were buried underneath

the debris of colonial history...

it begins with my love for my grandmother and finds its

present in the ongoing praxis of this love is the work itself.

Being able to share these fragments with you today is another act of

remembering...remembering my family’s history alongside

the collective movements of liberation happening in our backyards to overseas.

~from the river to the sea~ Free Palestine.