Near a busy intersection in the urban center of Gwangju, South Korea, architect Rem Koolhaas and novelist Ingo Niermann have split the pavement into three pedestrian lanes marked, “Yes,” “No,” and “None of the Above.” Each month, a banner installed overhead will present commuters with a different question the public has chosen from an online polling site — the first suggestion being, “Do you support democracy?” An on-site camera will tally the responses, and the results will be posted to the website.
Koolhaas and Niermann were drawn to Gwangju by the unique opportunity to work together, the political approaches they each apply to their respective fields making them ideal collaborators. “They’re fascinated by each other,” said architect and curator Nikolaus Hirsch, the director who commissioned the installation as part of the 2013 Gwangju Folly project. “The Vote,” as the meta-democratic exercise is titled, directly references Gwangju’s political identity. The city’s tragic 1980 military uprising and massacre is what parked the democratization of South Korea, the formation of Gwangju’s robustly funded art biennale program, and UNESCO’s recognition of the city’s historical archives as documents of human rights.
“The Vote” is also emblematic of Hirsch’s heightened ambition for the newly purpose-driven second installment of the Gwangju Follies, initially launched by architect Seung H-Sang during his role as the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale co-director. H-Sang introduced the term “folly” — an architectural term for functionless structures that has no equivelant Korean word — to the city by commissioning 10 architectural firms, including the likes of Peter Eisenman and Dominique Perrault, to dot historic Gwangju sites destroyed during early 20th-century Japanese colonization with whimsical towers, stages, and installations.
"The Vote" project by Rem Koolhaas & Ingo Niermann
“It was perceived as something a bit like drop sculpture,” Hirsch told ARTINFO of the previous follies, presented to the public as landmarks that citizens could put to use as “meeting places.” “I don’t want to criticize the first edition; it had its own logic of urban morphologies. But I think that building upon the experience of the first edition, it was also possible to be much more experimental and more complex in terms of conversation.”
Under Hirsch’s direction and new independence from Gwangju’s alternating art and design biennale programs, the eight new follies are site-specific in their focus on themes of democracy. This second round has also expanded beyond architecture with its inclusion of artists — Raqs Media Collective, Do Ho Suh, and Superflex — and authors alongside architect intellectuals like Ai Weiwei, Eyal Weizman and Samaneh Moafi, following the logic that public space isn’t exclusively used by a single profession. The headlining architects were paired with writers: Like Koolhaas, David Adjaye was drawn to the project by the opportunity to collaborate with a like-minded novelist. With Taiye Selasi — a Rome-based author who shares Adjaye’s Ghanian descent, London upbringing, Ivy League education, and transatlantic lifestyle — he designed the “Gwangju River Reading Room,” a library pavilion that promises to hold “200 books from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ to Emile Zola’s ‘Germinal’.”
The city’s new follies stretch the word’s definition by offering a tailored purpose, interacting directly with Gwangju society at large. Ai will contribute a politicized traditional food cart; emerging architects Seok-hong Go and Mihee Kim a transparent civic storage system. The most notable interaction arguably comes from Suh, in collaboration with his brother Euloh Suh’s Seoul-based Suh Architects: “In-Between Hotel” expands the artist’s oeuvre of ephemeral domestic spaces as a roving inn mounted on the back of a truck. Slated to park in the fire safety code-mandated gaps between Gwangju homes, “It has a very distinct urban agenda,” said Hirsch. “The morphology, the gap, the geometry is one thing. The other one is that this in-between space of course belongs to two neighbors, so how do you ask permission? He made this spatial construct that implies the concept of sharing, negotiations that maybe in the morning someone bring tea.”
This idea of asking citizens’ permission is reflected on a grander scale by Hirsch’s collaboration with local NGOs and preservation groups (“In the gallery you don’t need permission for anything,” he said. “In public space, you need much more legal frame, defined by society, by political systems, et cetera.”), recasting the public as collaborators in, rather than recipients of, the project. By accepting these constraints, the project eschews the arbitrary impressions left by its large-scale sculpture 2011 predecessors. Their thematic exploration of notions of public space, the arena for Korea’s uprising, make up for those shortcomings.
Gwangju Folly II officially opens November 10. Reservations for the “In-Between Hotel” can be made through the Gwangju Ramada Plaza.
