There are layers and layers when looking at one’s house in extreme detail. It’s always surprising how complicatedly they have been woven up and down, in joints, throughout the years that multispecies have inhabited. It was a day in about fifteen months since my move to this new basement house, and that was the day I first realized the mark next to my working chair actually looked like an insect fossilized covered by concrete. And I recognized the insect as an arthropod kind, which looks pretty similar to spiders at first glimpse – the insect I’ve often seen in our new apartment. Spiders are believed to have memories–memories of webs they staged yesterday. They remember the paths to the nets and check if any prey has been caught. Their memories are their very present moments of instinctual survival, completely dependent on the memories. Recounting own webs is a holistic understanding of the architecture, corners, scaffolds, floors, attics and basements of the inhabitancy. Yet, as verticality and horizontality mean differently to spiders than to humanity, I assume their memories of such spaces are contained differently.
I know I am the only permanent inhabitant exploring the light and dark webs I have built in my life. My traumatic memories have their drawers in my body and brain nerve systems even before I notice them. The messiness and complexities of its non-linear system create riffles of uncertainty in my remembering. But I am here listening to my thinking body sometimes through physical imprints and every single element of everyday life in which I am situated through familiar day/dreaming. For unFAQ, I wanted to see how my verticality and horizontality within the thinking body of my house can differ.
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang is a settler artist from South Korea, currently wandering in Tkaronto/ Toronto and works based in Tkaronto and Tiohtià:ke/Montreal on the land now called Canada. She works across interdisciplinary media, including cinema, video installation, text, performance, and participation. Her project-oriented practice is anchored in multi-platform research shifting between knowledge studies, psychosomatic, speech act, anxiety treatments, process philosophy and queer theory. She is interested in observing and discovering unsettling languages generated when personal storytelling and knowledge collide one another. Her keen eyes keep wandering around fleeing utterances, collective movements and storytelling, unrealized emotions to be realized. Kang obtained a BFA in Film Production at Sang Myung University in South Korea and an MFA from Concordia University in Canada. She has presented internationally, including at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2022), ArtScience Museum (2022), and Dazibao (2022), among others. She has participated/is participating in AiR programs at the AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence at Art Gallery of Ontario (2022) in Canada and ZK/U (2023) in Germany, among others. She has been awarded the RBC Newcomer Arts Award (2021) and was shortlisted for the Simon Blais Award (2016). She has published two self-publication projects, Absent Seats (2019) and Tenderhands #1-100 Limited Edition (2022) and is publishing Tenderhands (따뜻한 손) Volume 1 with Lefty Press based in Seoul, Korea (2023). She is a co-founding member of Quite Ourselves, an artist collective seeking sustainable mobility in life and art creation.
