academic workshop on Synchronicities by OKAP Collective at the public university of Kunsthochschule für Medien (KHM) Köln on May 8th 2024

 

« As transracial adoptees artists, we were separated from our natural Asian background at a young age and raised by European families in white heterosexual patriarchal societies. We grew up dissociated from our genetic heritage with a somehow colonized mindset. Through visual arts, we liberate ourselves from loyalties, labels and polarities at all levels and we combine our different heritages. We take ownership of our own lives, rewrite our own narratives and reinvent new hybridities and territories. In that safe space and through synchronicities, we have met and we called that place OKAP. During that workshop, we will share with you the context of transracial adoption in Korea, the landscapes of adoptees’ art collectives and the specificities of OKAP. We will also introduce our individual work in light with that process of realization and liberation. A moment of collective thinking and interaction will be closing our discussions.

(En)acting together, queering collectively

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“(T)he political seems to have as a characteristic the quality of arranging the relationship of things and of people within some form of society. It is an ordering principle, distinguishing the lawful or authorized order of things while itself being the origin of the regulation. We associate, then, the political with power, authority, order, law, the state, force, and violence— all of these are phenomena which restrict the outcome, deflect the extraneous, limit the relevant forces.” — Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. (…) Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

It begins with desire. A desire to breathe in resonance, to search for other forms of collectivity and hospitality that could accommodate the strangeness, “extraneous” that some of us call home. This seminar offers a home that emerges from cultures of collaborative and collective practices as a refusal to bear the responsibility of a single author. To foreground syncretism is to position ourselves toward decentralized ways of (en)acting together.

What we might want to manifest time and again is “that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” If queerness, as Muñoz indicates in his introduction to Cruising Utopia, must be theorized as collectivity, then mourning is, similarly, a mode of communicating or feeling-with that cannot make sense in isolation. That something is missing marks not only a radical disregard for solitary existence but also a fundamental disbelief in the metaphysics of completeness. Gone or not arrived yet, that which we mourn and makes us (home)sick, echoes our brokenness.