Akazi, Barocco, Arirang (score for a voice & folded archive)

Sound, installation, mixed-media, 5:54, 2025

Starting from the concept of eco-memory, wall and sound installation Akazi, Barocco, Arirang approaches two interwoven biographies: that of Korean nurse Lee Kye-soon, who migrated to Hamburg in the 1960s as a so-called guest worker, and that of the acacia tree, a species that spread along colonial routes between Europe and Asia. Both embody transgenerational trajectories of uprooting and transformation. Through these intertwined stories, the artist embarks on a sensual search for traces, in which memory appears not only as a human and linguistic phenomenon, but as something that circulates through our environment.

At the center of the work lies the Korean folk song Arirang. It serves as an acoustic archive of collective emotions and as a carrier of han (deep sorrow). Cho Ari weaves Arirang with baroque variation, ultrasonic sounds captured from the plant world, and the voice of Kang Jun, Lee Kye-soon’s daughter, creating a shift within which human and non-human memories coexist. While the sound vibrates through the temporal and structural dissolution of memory, the wall installation appears as the surface where its residue briefly settles into matter. The perforated plane, printed with photographic negatives and patterned after the oscillation waves that arise from the interference between plant signals and the human voice, acts as a permeable membrane at the threshold between the visible and the hidden, the present and the absent. In that way, the artist creates an auditory and material liminal space, in which memory becomes perceptible as a dynamic, interspecies network.

Concept & Direction: Cho Ari
Composition: Byun Min-kyung 

Voices: Kang Youn-Jun, Yerin Moerbeck

Voice recording: Noah-jinu Moerbeck

Special Thanks to Lee Kye-soon