Jane Jin Kaisen, Community of Parting (2019), Film Still.

Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum 

As a video essay that calls upon shamanism as its pivotal elan vital, Community of Parting, sets off as Koh Sun Ahn, the essay’s primary protagonist, an ageing shaman from Jeju Island, prepares to call upon the dead through a shamanic ritual. Banality enworlds this life. And why not? Rituals are encoded and driven by banal re-occurrences, repetitions as we knew them, or even still, banal habits. A cluster of tinned roof houses inform this world, and within them, a motley crew of ageing women, gather to set these codes of habits into a relay. Prayers are recounted, food laid in order, and the bell set to tone. And perhaps, then like any ritual that sets off from banality into ecstasy, Community of Parting moves from the comfortable sphere of domesticity to the billowing scraggly woods, its unkempt grasses and sparse canopy engulfing Koh Sun Ahn as she stands in its midst, praying and incanting, her back to us. With Jane Jin Kaisen’s lines on abandonment as quoted above papering over the track, the camera floats and glides, levitating her and us into a weighing lightness. Community of Parting, then, is this repetitious performativity of this weighing lightness, a call upon exaltation, but an exaltation that necessarily demands, and calls upon you, and me, the need to communicate with the dead, the other, the forgotten and the abandoned.    

To exalt, or to levitate, spiritually, physically or communicatively is the through-line of shamanism. But even then, our encounter with shamanism is more often than not couched in metaphors of rectitude. To lift, levitate, elevate, raise, soar and waft one could go on. With our terrestrial biases, our endearing affection for gravity, root and soil, anything that appears fantastical, or lofty appears astronomical, distant and vertically stratified. And what mediates this relationship between our earthly mortalities and celestial forbearances is air, enfolding, and enveloping between us and them. It is in this place of enfoldment, in air, that shamanism lies. Shamanism, or the shaman who performs this exaltation,  communicates/mediatesbetween that which is the immediate, the corporeal, the earthly present, and all which remains in its excess; the cosmic, the non-human, or the dead. Shamans regularly cross ontological boundaries and peek into a world rendered opaque for others. They make intimate or familiar that which is no longer tactile, immediately graspable, or even comprehensible. A shaman performatively folds back the distant onto us. Koh Sun Ahn performs the same, but perhaps in this act of folding, which is also always the act of doubling or falling back upon, the shaman, begins to double up as a historian, a witness, an interlocutor to those killed in the Jeju April 3rd Massacre. Her shamanism subsists on a long historically cultivated practice of remembrance and re-intimation of those long gone by those left behind, a fragile suturing of a world violently ruptured by the genocide.  A shaman not only locates in space, but in time. As the ritual commences, it acknowledges, and enacts, the unmooring of time. Through the ritual, the shaman and the person calling the ritual to place, moves across different scales of time, of human, non-human and more-than-human times. Here time intrudes, projects, occupies the space of the present, and opens up to visitations from a nebulous futurity. 

At the shamanic interface then lies the performance of labor, a belabored abandonment of the self to let the other in, to be engulfed by them. And yet, it is this abandonment that enacts the fulfillment of history.  As a discourse that has always already been relegated into the depths of darkened oblivion, history is called upon,  incoherently, or fragmentarily at best, to be present to those who seek to encounter it.  Koh Sun Ahn’s chants therefore thaw into a dirge, it is a litany of lives lost, cries unheard, and founding violences of the modern Korean nation-state. It is the folding back of all those who were abandoned, a shamanic clericality that recounts the peninsula distraught by colonial and imperial violence. Every call to number, date, zodiac sign and calendar is a logistical move to the portal of historical violence, and every Korean Won engenders the performativity of cosmic debt. Money mediates relations, exchanges, and transformations. Between institutions, people, and contracts that lay their destinies out. But offering money to spirits is not an absolution of history, repatriation or closing off from historical lack, a settling of debts. It is only its continued avowal, an ever-widening abscission that could be mediated upon only if these spirits inhered in Koh Sun Ahn. Shamanism is no frictionless act of retelling or remembering, and neither frictionless interfacing with the past. It is interfacing that wrinkles and folds sheets of time, like her skin metamorphosed under the weight of its own matter. Koh Sun Ahn carries with her the trauma of her family’s sudden partings, through abuse, state violence and poverty, her family and her memories thereof splintered like the gashes and wounds of the Korean peninsula.

A desire for histories, and the impossibilities of its mediation thereof, perhaps invite us what it is to be a shaman. A shaman mediates between desires and histories, corporeal presences and subjective absences. Between times and spaces that could not otherwise be sutured together. But then again, to be counterintuitive would be to ask oneself: what is it to mediate? And what does mediation entail? Mediation’s roots could be found in late Latin, referring to be placed in the middle, to be found in the middle, to be interposed. However, to purely talk about etymologies is to neatly circumscribe history. To parse the skins of mediation, would be then to think of its legal-juridical bearings that we never lost their stranglehold of; to arbitrate, reconciliate or mend in disputes. And mediation’s communicative mid-twentieth century valence would be to find an intermediate agency that could also convey, or make perceptible language, the articulable, and the sayable of a given social phenomenon or even natural occurrences. And even so, to mediate would be to find a way between organisms and their environments, between bodies in their nature-cultures. But perhaps, an unbeknownst a-priori to all mediations is to bring about, to emerge, to transform, and to write into existence. 

Therefore, if the performative condition of shamanism is to inter-mediate between the heaven and the skies, to levitate from the rooted ontological bearings of the ground, a levitation that exceeds ontological strictures, then it also exceeds its mere facticity in the image, its inscription into the diegetic universe of the video essay. It seeps, engulfs and enfolds into the essay itself, bringing about, emerging, transforming the video essay into existence. If mediation enthrusts a creative poesis, a ‘being in and emerging with the world’ then what does this algorithm entail? Shamanic mediation thrives at the realm of the cut. The cut is not a symbolic indication of rupture or abandonment, or amputation even. A cut is the irreparable rift that calls upon for mediation to happen, a spatial abyss that needs to be spoken to. The cut is the site and interval of exchange, an imperfect sphere of transformation that only but perpetuates its imperfection. Community of Parting then cuts, and cuts through regimes of history, sense-making and community forming. A helicopter’s swirling envelopment, melds into the clanging of gongs and bells, a repetitious trance that levitates or mediates between temples, caves, walls and diplomatic roundtables. The essay cuts through faceless faces inscribed and embossed upon the shiny black mural wall at the Korean War memorial in DC, giant LED screens replaying history on large iron cast bridges, the North Korea, Russia-China border, swarms of crowds hovering metro stations, war monuments across North Korea, Jeju and Kazakhstan. To mediate, for Community of Parting, is to cut between faces and swarms, subjects and crowds, to those we know, and those who merely pass by.   Faceless faces, some part of a crowd, and some hidden behind a mask, and some inscribed into the camera with a fortuitous presence, a happenstance, all write themselves, or emerge with and into history, a history that necessarily exceeds the human self. Mediation makes the subjective into the subjunctive, a what if, if things, and histories, bodies and gestures, interfaced or encountered the other? But perhaps this interface happens nowhere to be, except in the mediative space the essay throws about. The interval is its own realm, like the cosmic in-between abandoned in ether, waiting to take shape, be fulfilled. Disparate abandoned geographies are sutured with subliminal convulsions: found between neon flickers of Itaewon, Seoul’s entertainment district, built around the American military base, or the tinned alleys of Kazakhstan or a food truckstop in Los Angeles. A subliminal convulsion for communities whose communion  is only left to be huddled together in drawing rooms, and in most cases even that mediation is impossible. Here, border crossings mediate in the form of Taeyang-jŏl imagery, a naive propagandist video undercut by surreptitious scarring of the peninsula; the Korean partition that haunts personal memory. Infrastructures, buildings, bridges, shipment – nothing escapes the ire of generational anguish, even a resounding gong melds into a plastic, gnawing refrain. Harrowing and excessive, this cut vaults across an abandoned Korean population, forcibly displaced through war and political tumult, populating the margins of central Asia, pockets of Europe, North America and an inwardly oblivious East Asia. And where nothing is to be heard, in the space of ether or interval that is, we hear the Zainichis, the exiled North Korean diaspora in Japan, caught between an impossible desire to return to Korea, and Japan’s right wing populism that outcasts them. Or even the Koryo-saram-s, thrust into deep dikes of Soviet nationalism; with present generations speaking primarily Russian, and older generations speaking a satoori unheard now in the mainland.  

Perhaps, to return to the interval or the cut, is to fundamentally avow the specificities of mediation that it engenders, the video essay. For a stylistic edifice as invariably mutative as the essay, the cut and the mediation enable Community of Parting to itself unmoor, levitate, transpose off the ground. It braids and entwines, histories and myths beyond a meager human existence, a history beyond utterance, remembrance and severance. Community of Parting mediates the myth of Bari, the abandoned seventh daughter of a legendary king who is left in the Hwancheongang, the river that connects the lands between life and death; to Jeju Island, and the memorial for the victims of the Jeju April 3rd Massacre (Jeju Sassam); diasporic narratives of overseas Koreans, both from migrant and refugee families, before slipping in and out of scenes of a ritual performed for the artist herself, to connect her to her ancestors in Jeju, who also suffered the horrors of massacre. As Community of Parting would  remind us, the space of mediation is a fractal, if not fractured one. The space of mediation is an awkward gawky crystal, rough edges that not only make its media forms sit uncomfortably, but a perspectival quagmire from which the search of a loci of enunciation deems infeasible. In this transformation that mediation enables, something emerges; perhaps a body politic transfixed in this ether. If the founding myth of the modern nation state lies in the concoction of the imagined community, transfixed around the patriarchal family, its counter-intuitive reality lies in the Bari myth, an abandoned princess left to heal the world on her own shoulders. That is, even as the essayistic mediation reminds us of an uncomfortable past that cannot be discarded, the nation and the imagined body politics yoked to it sit uneasily, fastened and yet (un)reasonably unmoored.  Community of Parting performs a ritual of refusal to inherit the nation – which is not to deny its originary violence, but rather to make space for this trauma, and to encounter, or to interface with it.It is refusal to be defined by refusal. To be abandoned thus, is to find oneself in that ether, levitating and moving, but as the early accounts of vertical mediation might have shed light on, finding oneself in air absolutely still, having hardly recognized there was any movement at all. Everything moves and yet often quite imperceptibly so. In this space of mediation, then, that a masculinist inheritance of the nation parts ways to the community parted, proposing multiplicities of modes of belonging to space, to time, and perhaps even to the nation. The Bari myth finds itself, in the genealogy of feminist critique even,writing itself as a proto-feminist text that mediates the relationship to the state. In the Barigongju myth, the abandoned daughter returns from the land of the dead to save the lives of the parents, and having done so, refuses her patriarchal inheritance. She chooses instead to become the first shaman (and thus the tale also serves as the origin myth of Korean shamanism), mediating between the worlds of the living and the dead.  It is then to the forest that Bari goes, asking the passing wind and the perforated skies about her true self, doubtful of herself caught in the quagmire of a cosmological duality. The forest reeks of silence, a characteristic chaotic vegetal mass shunned against an expansive rocky outgrowth. Far from being merely nested in the history of vegetal and creaturely proliferation, the forest that naturalists would have had us believe, the forest in its own historical reality that wrestles with mines and sensors a history of warfare and fragile peace oozing in its midst. Politically, the forest is caught between its own fraught positionality of ethereal preservation, mythical almost, and militarization that seeks to teeth it apart. But beneath its umfortable rustle, its summerly disquietude, the forest responds. It levitates Bari, Koh Sun Ahn, Kaisen and us, to remember and recollect all the spirits that had tormented Bari, and to wish them away in the rustling wind. But the spirits are never forgotten, never wholly discounted. They are recounted, only to be wished away again and again, a repetitious loop that never quite fully closes unto itself.  A litany of culprits, potential or otherwise, waft into pleas for reconciliation, as the camera levitates from the vegetal floor of the forest to the trunks, branches, its canopy and above, shifting colors textures and scale. But perhaps as Ahn’s dirges draw the essay into a close, one is reminded of the shamanic levitation’s weighing lightness, a wafting vision scathed by the terrors of history.

Abhijan X. and Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum

This essay is available in Community of Parting, Jane Jin Kaisen and Anne Kølbæk Iverson (eds.), Archive Books (2021).

Community of Parting is an extension and continuation of Jane Jin Kaisen artistic practice. Kaisen brings past and present, the eternal and the temporal into play through layered, performative and multi-voiced, feminist works that explore topics such as memory, war, migration, and borders in a field where individual experiences and collective stories intersect. Her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance and reconciliation, thus forming alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.

Presenting a selection of artworks realized between 2010 and 2020 through installation views and film stills together with a vast array of research material and archival documents, this monograph is the hitherto most comprehensive introduction to the artist’s work. The book is composed of several interwoven voices: Community of Parting’s film script that integrates oral testimonies with poetics by Kim Hyesoon, poetry by Mara Lee, and shamanic ritual chants by Koh Sunahn, accompanied by essay contributions by Heidi Ballet, Anselm Franke, Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum, Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Jane Jin Kaisen, Hyunjin Kim, Soyi Kim, Yongwoo Lee, and conversations with Mary Kelly and Kim Seongnae.