Silence of the Well is part of Listen to the Silence for Seoul. This piece simultaneously considers the present and the past; we listen to the sound of the well which has slept for 600 years as well as the sounds of today. Silence is not the absence of sound. Rather, it is the savoir-faire of listening. Silence, is it memory? Shall we merge different temporalities in the same moment? Does silence recall the absence of memory?
Listen to the silence of the well. Sound installation in the garden of the Seoul Museum of History, north of the Gyeoung hui Palace, where a well is situated. The well, now empty and dry as a bottomless jar, was indispensable in the past; there, the women of the court found the water used to cook rice for the king. The gust of wind of modernization that would have transformed feng shui dried up the water, and with it the wind of the old capital Hanyang. Once gone, it cannot return, so instead we will pour into the bottomless well the dust of the city of Seoul.
Listen to the sound of the well.
Pour the songs of the asphalt,
Pour the songs of the buses,
Pour the songs of the pines,
Pour the songs of the internet,
Pour the songs of the birds,
Pour the songs of the stock exchange,
Pour the songs of the cuckoo,
Pour the songs of the red dust (hong jin) of
Seoul, So-ri kut han pan.
20 June 2010
Kim Soun Gui
