2023 ACC CONTEXT Walking, Wandering

Listen to the City

〈Texture of Street〉, 2023.

Single-channel video, color, sound, approx. 15min.

Director Listen to the City
Cinematographer and Editor Kyungman Kim
Music Maalib

Commissioned by Asia Culture Center.

Listen to the City is an art, urbanism, and research collective that started in 2009. The collective comprises urban researchers, designers, architects, filmmakers, and activists. The director of the team, Eunseon Park, studied art and urban planning, and Hyunwook is an activist who has been involved in educational and urban movements.
Listen to the City began its creative activities by asking questions regarding environmental and social irresponsibility and the destruction of cultural diversity—problems linked to the excessive development of Korea.

For this exhibition, Listen to the City made a video which questions the city that has been built in the perspective of the non-disabled. The film shows that the city’s roads and alleys focus only on improving the efficiency of healthy non-disabled people, rather than being spaces that value all members of the society. Korean society tells us to be fast, free of mistakes, and economically successful. Formal education systems teach that life that is lived slowly and differently from the norm means falling behind. There is no time for those who are sick or slow in the urban spaces that reflect the “survival of the fittest” values which Korean people pursue. And within this system, some people act as if it were just to detest life that is lived at a different speed.
Listen to the City conducted an interview in 2017 with Kim 00, a 34-year-old woman with a physical disability, while producing a film that interviewed disabled people who suffered from the Pohang earthquake. She could only walk with the help of an assistive device called a walker. During the interview, she said she had never taken a train and has never left Pohang. And she added, “You need to see things in order to feel and think about things.” Listening to her story inevitably led to asking her about her perceptions of urban space, and to think about the privileges that non-disabled people have. Through the film, the attempt is to talk about roads and alleys as spaces that capture various times and values.
Also presented together will be previous works and research which became the starting point of this work, such as posters, manuals, websites, and videos visualizing the disaster evacuation methods for the disabled.