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Guryong-Voice As Trash (Audio)

Jan 17, 2020
Created by Alessando Bosetti (2016). Introduced by Karen Werner.
Guryong-Voice As Trash was commissioned by the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s radio art show, Soundproof in 2016. Writes Bosetti, “This piece is about Guryong a shantytown in south Korea. Guryong is an illegal encampment in Seoul, very close to the rich southside district of Gangnam from which it is separated by a six-lane motorway. [The Guryong shantytown] was created by people evicted from other low-income areas which have been demolished during the city’s rapid development. Around 3,000 people, primarily impoverished elderly, came to this area as their last refuge and live in unsafe and make-shift constructions of plywood, felt and sheet metal. The piece takes inspiration from the discarded materials Guryong is made of, a huge and diverse assemblage of debris and waste. Every time I was there I felt that the trash wanted to tell me something. Once again my starting point is language even if in this piece I came to like the idea of a world without language or a world like our own – so full of stuff, products and waste – where language is just one object among many others we can use to build things, houses and pieces of art. In 2013 and 2014, I visited Guryong several times accompanied by Okkyung, my partner at the time, a native of Daejong, South Korea. Our relationship was breaking apart but still we had decided to undertake this trip together to her country either as a way to reconcile or to find a proper way to say farewell to each other, we weren’t so sure ourselves.” - Excerpted from http://www.melgun.net.

As you’ll hear, the piece revolves around Bosetti’s love for the sound of one person’s voice that he hears in Guryong. One of the things that intrigues me about this piece is that Bosetti describes how he is constructing the piece within the piece. - Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.