1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015, 29.

 

2. The Yeti is the Snowman that is said to inhabit the Himalayan mountains, but remains a mystery except for the trace of a footstep.

 

3. Eunji Cho, <액체팔각>,

zineseminar, issue 01, 2019.

(http://www.zineseminar.com/wp/issue01/액체팔각/ )

 

 

4. Donna Haraway, Staying with Troubles-Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016, 49.

 

 

5. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015, 27

 

 

6. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015. 27-8.

 

The Song of Sisters with Eight Eyes

 

Jinshil Lee

 

 

 

It is unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasize that we each survive alone.1

- Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

 

 

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Her hair sweeps across the ground. Her face meets the floor. Following the breath as slow as a snail, toes stretch far out and then draw into her breasts. The performer who alternates from the dining earth—settled down in a golden hue—and the fur earth—floating in a pale light— gives out no sound of breathing or rustling. During the performance of four hours, spectators come in muted steps, watch the dance in a hushed silence and then leave quietly. Time seems to stop ticking and be on hold. The piece of SCOBY touched by the performer’s body sways with a plop. Thin hair like the tentacles of a jellyfish dance, too. On the black and white surface of printed fur, the performer’s hair overlaps. Both crumple gently. The unrhythmical body, unlike a freely floating one, bends, folds, and lets the limbs hang, then brings itself upright - in admiration of the voluptuousness of those without vertebrae.

It was difficult in the first place to watch from the beginning to the end of the performance. Those sojourning let themselves sink in for a while in the slightly sagging ephemerality in a moment of the performance, then ease themselves to flow away. It is a retention in the time of transition between the two earths. However, in the brief moment, they hold their breath and participate in the quiet vortex of senses. As one quietly traces the fine, slow movements visible to the eye, senses such as hearing and touch come alive like serpents. (The floor is warm.) A subtle reverberation spreads out from inside the shiny stainless bowl. Soon, the fine hair of my auricle tickles as the soundwaves embrace me front and back, above and below. I try cupping my hand and then unfurl it.

 

 

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Among the images of fur that she has collected, there is one of long furry claws. When I asked about what the creature was, she sent me the link to a cute website that introduces oceanic creatures in each water level. As I scrolled far down to a deep water level, I found that the claws belonged to the yeti crab, inhabiting the depth of 1,650 meters near the hydrothermal vents. The elegant claws of the hairy queen crab from the depths of the ocean are brilliant, as if scoffing at the destitution of the two-legged yeti of the Himalayas.2

 

 

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The left eye looks left. At the same time the right eye looks right. Or,

the left eye looks up. At the same time the right eye looks ahead. Or,

the left eye looks ahead, and at the same time, the right eye looks back.3

 

The eight legs have tentacles. They are in fact, eight eyes for learning the world. Seeing by touching. Seeing ahead, back, right, left and askew. Groping like the eyes of a dragonfly. The tentacular senses of octopuses, spiders; octagon beings that reach out and infiltrate into eight directions.

The octagon language that searches for a new encounter pursues the circular, but reminds of a potential dynamis open to contact and reverberation from each other, rather than a closed circle. Such a dynamis has appeared in Eunji Cho’s work from long ago. From Mud Blossom, or in fact, from mud-throwing performance like Dtang, The Mud Said. While the denotation keeps changing from mud to star, flower, dining table then to octopus and octagon, the object-language is always fluid and sticky, as well as being very plain and secular while emitting a simple sanctity. To Cho, these things are not simply mediums for meditation, but a door for her to meet her twin self, living in different sensory worlds. Flower, stingray, octopus, moth, Bodhisattva and alien spin in synapse with different versions of others. It forms a mandala of a thousand shadows.

 

 

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The song of octopuses

The song of sisters with eight legs

The song of all Terrans with tentacles

 

The terrestrial time-space of ‘Anthropocene’, as presented by geology around 2008, evokes the earth’s crisis and the end of humanity that burned fossil fuels and destructed the ecosystem. Nonetheless, Donna Haraway criticizes the myth system of Man that remains intact in the term. "It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor,” she argues.4  There remain many stories of the earth that do not cast the anthropos as their protagonist, and the stories that have not been woven must be reimagined. How can so many stories outside the perspective of human exceptionalism be woven? To participate in that new point, what must we dispose of? Couldn’t some altered consciousnesses, instead of holding onto the illusion of authentic self, or pursuing a transcendency like gods, lead us to the sensory worlds of other terrestrial species? Diving into the world of sisters with eight legs, eight eyes, and eight selves. Not to overcome the apocalyptic panic in the rampant virus breakout, but to speculate about the simultaneity of living and dying that all beings undergo. Not for good life, but good deaths.

 

 

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Soil and fur are languages of the body, as well as of the skin. Something that is skimmed and dug up from the nonliving ground and the skin of the living. Something that is at once deeply embedded in the epidermis and snugly covers it. The soil of Berlin that dribbled from a plastic bag, stainless containers that she collected from the Clock Alley of Yeji-dong, cigarette butts, images of fur… The things that Cho scrapes together are things that tend to be metaphors of identity or substitute signifiers of some people (commonly soil for motherland, and fur for mammals and primates). But for Cho, these are ‘skins’ that transcend species, with different textures and shapes; at once inside and outside; boundaries, but at the same time the momentum to annihilate those boundaries. It is a time of fine encounters, a belt of contact and resonance. The collection, seated in a circle, becomes a microcosmos that shares some universality regardless of the boundary between the living and nonliving. Cho’s work always assumes the nature of performance that shows a possibility of weaving anew through the mediation of divided realms. “How does a gathering become a ‘happening’...?”5  Anna Tsing calls the place of such momentums crepitating, the assemblage.

 

 

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Her work is always in ‘transition’. It always slowly moves to a different object, to a different place. From mud to flowers, to shooting stars, to the dining table, to a redeveloped alley, to the ocean, octopuses, twins, and then again to the earth. As anyone who has continued to watch her work would feel, the process is not about seeking the subject matter for a completely different, new work, nor an innovative attempt, a change or a turning point. Rather, it is a metastasis to the shadow or the other side of the pair, of the object that she has been focusing on in her series of work. It is also an evidence to the fact that she is always in the process of fission. All those that appear in her work, including the soil, octopuses, stars, and earths, are splitting into another state of themselves. Thus the symbolic metaphors in her work are always twofold. The meaning of ‘Dtang (ground)’ and the disruptive/episodic momentum delivered by its sound; the contemptibility of mud and the dynamics of its blooming shape; the décalcomanie form of Letter Fish Fish Letter 文魚魚文 and its trace seeping out like a shadow; and the serial operation of form and meaning in a continuous transition. It is never a structure of opposition, nor a preliminary seeking for the other half for integrating into a whole one.

“Each of all babies of this world has a twin octopus upon being born.” To Cho, who runs to the sea in pursuit of a saying from an Indonesian myth, there isn’t any destined encounter. She plays a ball game for a while with octopuses that were dragged out from the sea without knowing, draws mandalas with them only to let them leave again. It is a brief rooting for another Terran living on the surface of a planet, the living and dying of one another. In Octopusy Ecstacy that is displayed as a dual channel video, a chronologically played video and an inversely played video are set against each other like twins. The two earths and two times are not dichotomous ‘pairs’ like human/nature, man/woman, mind/body, self/other, depth/surface or rationality/passion. They are a round song on the ever incomplete and repeating life, the lives that are being and not-being at once, and the time that lives and dies simultaneously.

 

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Eunji Cho has been casting questions on the eco-political paradoxes of the world we live in, through various media including sculpture, performance, video and installation. Her works, which by no way reduce into suggestions, opposite logics, or alternatives such as ‘saving the environment’ or ‘naturalism’, lead us to the paradoxes and complexities of each life in capitalism and ecological ruins due to their depth of sensitivity. She does not eat meat. She says it is a result not of an ethical determination but of an eating disorder from a mental problem. As such an artist, her attitude shown in works like Dog Farm Concert and Cow Bathing for Spring Day is calm, to the extent of being stark. In the ritualistic acts of singing “Millions of Roses” and bathing with great care the lives soon to be slaughtered, a firmly armed sorrow rises, like that of Mary Magdalene. Unlike the disciples who denied Jesus’ prophecy of his death, she quietly washed and anointed his feet.

It is a fearful thing to face the realities of killing living creatures and making them into food. Overseas vegetarians often visit slaughterhouses to spread proper awareness of butchering cows or pigs and to change the process, and this visit is called “vigil”. Vigil, etymologically originating from devotional overnight watching for martyrs, is indeed a time of condolences and determined testimony. It calls for a very firm heart. In rituals for those soon to be killed, it seems that one must firmly hold oneself with a cold current, rather than holding back the tears or facing the fear. To really pray, instead of helplessly crying in self-pity, one would have to keep her head straight.

 

 

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A pungent smell greeted me as I stepped into her studio. In a corner, there are glass jars in various shapes, with yellowish brown liquid in them. Inside the jars is ‘SCOBY(Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast)’, also known as kombucha. This curious liquid mushroom becomes a clotted cell as it keeps fermenting, and grows thick like leather. Since 2018, Cho has been experimenting with SCOBY, creating objects and assemblages of diverse forms. SCOBY coagulates and droops like membranes or mucus, hardens into a firmer husk in the air or shrinks like the skin of a dead animal. It seems that the reason she is ‘fixated’ on SCOBY is neither simply the fluidity and novelty in form, nor an experiment of combining natural materials, against the creation of artists. She fondles with objects that she cannot dominate, things that can easily tear. She knits, stitch by stitch, the stories of uncontrollable uncertainty and contingency.

SCOBY is a lot like the coral reef. They lithify, but they are certainly living, or what used to be living. When a soft, perishable being beyond the categories of living and non-living appear before us as something reified and taxidermied, the traces and shadows of its life appear not as the gloriole of the artwork but as a strange touch and smell, surging into our lungs. Thus we find our other selves as we become penetrated and laid over by those small tentacular beings.

In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Tsing write of ‘contamination as collaboration’. “...[What] is survival? In popular American fantasies, survival is all about saving oneself by fighting off others. The ‘survival’ featured in U.S. television shows or alien-planet stories is a synonym for conquest and expansion. I will not use the term that way. Please open yourself to another usage. This book argues that staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across differences, which leads to contamination. Without collaboration, we all die.” 6