Royce Ng & Daisy Bisenieks
2011, Sing the Fruits of Our Labour, video documentation
Our performance is intended as a reciprocal act of giving food back to the market sellers as a gesture of thanks 30 years later as well as an acknowledgement of the role Daein Market played in the protests and in the history of Gwangju city. In our performance, a modified food cart, commonly used and seen in the market, symbolically incorporates the iconic shelter design of Daein market, as well as functioning as a mobile karaoke machine. Popular Korean songs, including a protest song heard often during the protests in 1980, are combined with film footage of Daein market and Gwangju to create the karaoke video for the songs as well as a larger emotional setting for the performance. Using ingredients sourced from the market,tea and rice ball snacks were prepared were handed out to the market sellers together with a Korean/English map charting the diverse businesses and activities of the market as an act of remembrance and recognition of the market’s social contributions, both past and present. We hope that this performance will have some direct benefits for the market in generating more interest and providing understanding and navigation of businesses, services and community activities for visitors with the help of the map.
During the Gwangju Democratic Movement protests in 1980, the market sellers in Daein Market mobilized to provide rice balls, food and drinks to the student protesters who were being mercilessly targeted by the Korean military forces. They also provided refuge for many who ran into the market to escape from the soldiers by hiding them in their shops.
Prior to the performance, we had no idea how the market sellers would respond to us and the work functioned in some way as a social experiment with a poetic hypothesis where the market sellers became the uncontrolled variable around which we had to structure our performance. So pushing the cart out of Artspace Ugro and into the arcades and laneways of the market to distribute our chocolate rice ball snacks and Chinese tea, we were filled with a sense of excitement mixed with trepidation. What if the market sellers were offended by our somewhat whimsical response to their role in Gwangju's political history or responded to our gesture of thanks with an understandable incomprehension or even hostility?
What happened was more interesting and sincerely touching beyond anything we could have anticipated. Perhaps what we underestimated was the effect that giving away something for free without any obligations or agendas, however small and insignificant, has in shifting the interpersonal social dynamic in money based economies. When we gave people the snacks, you could read in their faces the reflexive, natural suspicion give way to simple pleasure. And when we explained through a translator why we were giving them the snacks, there was a genuine gratitude elicited from all the sellers. Even from one who initially thought that we were doing promotion for a new shop opening in the market.
Another completely unexpected response was that after we gave them our food, many of the sellers seemed to feel the obligation of reciprocity implicit in the gift and responded by giving us something from their own stall so that the performance became an exchange as much as anything else. Many sellers expressed how they were happy that someone was remembering their crucial role in the Gwangju Democratic Movement, especially now that it seems the market has become somewhat neglected and forgotten by the general public, and one of our Korean friends who accompanied us during the performance mentioned that she saw some of the sellers reduced to tears by the gesture. One seller told us that we were stirring things up again, but in a good way and spontaneous conversations about 1980 would start up at many of the stalls we visited. The convivial feelings of human warmth generated through the simple act of sharing and remembrance was palpable throughout the performance, across the language barriers and seemed to be felt by the sellers and observers of the performance alike.
Edited video documentation of the performance
