#Bak Solmay

[theoffingmag]

Bak Solmay, "Cocoa" (from Future Walking Rehearsals), translated from Korean by Tamina Hauser

[contemporaryartdaily]

Busan Biennale 2020

[always-returning]

Thirty or forty years ago, science fiction writers believed that things beyond one’s imagining would happen in years beginning with the numeral 2, and in their novels, marvelous things had already happened. For this reason, the years in the 2000s that had already gone by did not seem like the past, but the future. We could only look at them with dread or surprise, or with our eyes closed in pleasure. The accident had happened in Unit 1 of the Kori Nuclear Power Plant, built in 1977. The plant had already reached the end of its intended lifespan in 2007, and operations were briefly suspended, and this was neither science fiction nor news, but a fact or minor incident. Adapting the perspective of the times, the year 1977 is science. It’s the future. Energy. Growth. Development. It’s Developed Nation status. We are entranced by the bright energy produced, and this past isn’t anything like what we think of as those days. But it’s so dazzling that I can’t stay long. Maybe if I could hold hands with the people next to me and trust my body to the rhythm of the future, I’d burst out laughing in that dazzling place, and be able to live there, in 1977, with the bright future. The future is a little more realistic in 2007, but if they’d stopped operations for good then, I wouldn’t be walking in dark alleys with a lion, would I? Even though walking with a lion is not necessarily bad in itself. The future that lies before me in 2007 is just as it was before the accident. People don’t leave, and no one dies. It looks ordinary and not much different, but the future viewed from 2007 is very vivid and I want to steal it and put it in my pocket.

Bak Solmay, “Swaying into the Darkness”