Rice | 2017 

Monologue Performance, Approx. 10min, FFT Düsseldorf. 

Rice is a monologue performance set against the backdrop of 1980s South Korea, a period of military dictatorship during which tens of thousands of civilians were arbitrarily detained without legal grounds. At the time, the mere absence of an ID card could be sufficient cause for arrest.

The performance follows the story of a young man who set out to hike the Jiri Mountains one winter day and never returned. His family searched every mountain in the south of the country for years, yet found no trace of him. Still, his parents chose to believe he was alive somewhere, that he had built a new life and a family of his own. His mother continues to pray for his health to this day — and each time, she asks the same thing: whether he has eaten well.

The work lingers on this question. It holds the disappearance and absence left by state violence within the most familiar language of care in Korean culture — "Have you eaten?" — a phrase that carries love, worry, and longing all at once. Rice quietly reveals how trauma that was never permitted to be publicly mourned finds its way into the rhythms of everyday life, surfacing in the words that remain when everything else has been taken away.

The work is presented in Klinke Kunst Projektraum, Cheer for fears festival 2017. 

Performance script