Exhibition View: Digital Art Culture Lab Showcase: Orbit of Light at Gwangju Media Art Platform

The Birth of Togetherness

12-Channel Spatial Sound and Coffin

Variable Dimensions

2025

Inspired by Han Kang’ s Human Acts, I star ted thinking about another layer of the history of the Gwangju Uprising. When I first visited Gwangju, I saw many buildings connected to the events of May 18th, and I began to wonder: do these buildings hold memories of that day? These questions come from my interest in history and my reflections on similar events in my home country , Indonesia, which also caused many deaths.

The project explores memory through the vibrations of Gwangju’ s historical buildings and spaces. By “interviewing” them with seismic microphones, I try to listen to the traces embedded in their structures and capture what the buildings might “say” through their materials and sounds. Memory is explored through the activity of people in these spaces, helping us imagine the past and reflect on it today . Like ruins that preserve visual evidence, buildings can be acoustic archives. The creak of wooden floors, the resonance of empty rooms, the hum of walls weathered by time—all carry layers of history . These sounds are not literal recordings but vibrational imprints shaped by the building’ s history , materials, and human presence.

The collected sounds are composed into a single narrative, presented as a 12-channel spatial sound installation. It draws from the experience of a survivor who struggled to reach a hospital to give bir th during the military crackdown. Her story became par t of Gwangju’ s collective memory . While she fought to bring life into the world, the people of Gwangju were fighting to give bir th to the foundations of democracy .