Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot

Forum Expanded Exhibition 2020

Petra Genetrix, a fictitious entity composed of a mineral or data cluster, awakens to find itself dropped on the shoreline of the island Crypto Valley. Petra experiences a migration review, facing authorities who regard migrants as equivalent to aliens or viruses. Failing its review, Petra gets confined to the alien detention center Smart Grid, but after encountering a visual/auditory hallucination, it escapes, following a beckoning voice to the island’s center. There, within the caverns, it encounters the Mother Rock, a data center or ancient cloud and transcendent presence that has existed in this place for eons…
A sequel to Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017), this piece expands upon the previous work through the migration of Petra Genetrix. Juxtaposing refugee migration with data migration, both of which characterize migration in the 21st century, the work creates an imaginary space-time and interrogates the “ways of existence” and the “ways of representation” of a group of Yemeni refugees who recently arrived in South Korea. Further scenes lay out biopolitical control, as experienced by Petra, reflecting the state of affairs in which refugees are treated as a kind of malware.

by Ayoung Kim
with Yasameen Al-Qaifi, Ahmed Mohammed Askar, Yousef Abdullah Al-Rahmi, Woochul Im, Jungeon Park, Alice Evans, Sae-ro-mi Lee, Sera Jung Republic of Korea 2016 English, Korean, Arabic 23’ Colour

With

Yasameen Al-Qaifi (Performer for Stratum)
Ahmed Mohammed Askar (Performer for Wave)
Yousef Abdullah Al-Rahmi (Performer for Stone)
Woochul Im (Gatekeeper)
Jungeon Park (CPIP Ad Host)
Alice Evans (Voice for Petra Genetrix)
Sae-ro-mi Lee (Voice for Mother Rock)
Sera Jung (Voice for Introduction of "Smart Grid")

Crew

Written and Directed by	Ayoung Kim
Cinematography	Seokjun Lee
Montage	Ayoung Kim, Jihyun Min, Yong Jeong
Music	CIFIKA, Dang-Khoa Chau aka D.K.
Sound Design	CIFIKA, Daewoong Lim, Sisu Park, Nopitchonair
Sound	Seunghwan Jeon
Costumes	Yun.5 Lee, Dahee Choi
Make-Up	Jiwon Moon
Assistant Director	Jihyun Min, Sangmin Lee
Production Manager	Youeun Choi, Seungmin Hong
Producer	Heejung Oh
Executive Producer	Heejung Oh

Produced by

Seesaw Pictures

Ayoung Kim

Ayoung Kim was born in 1979 in Seoul, South Korea, where she currently lives and works. Interested in the notions of crossings, transmissions, transnationals, transpositions, and reversibility, she seeks possible integrations, articulations, and collisions of things in between time, space, structure, and syntax. In doing so, Kim adopts the devices of storytelling, narrativity, and rhetoric to evoke unfamiliar forms of reading, listening, and thinking of the conditions of the world by focusing on unlikely encounters of ideas. The outcomes take the forms of video, voice, sonic fiction, image, diagram, and text, and are exposed as exhibition, performance, theater project, and publication. Recently, Kim has been endeavoring to graft and collide the fictional and the historical together through distorting reality.

Filmography

2011 PH Express; video installation, 11 min. 2012 Please Return to Busan Port; video installation, 5 min. 2017 Porosity Valley, Portable Holes; video installation, 21 min. 2019 Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot; video installation, 23 min.

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2020