Date. September 12, 2020
[Talk Video]
Reorganization of Urban Space, Publicness, and Technology after COVID-19
Re-tracing Buro is a collective based in Seoul and Paris, formed by independent curator, Somi Sim and artist, Julien Coignet. Created in 2017 as a temporary collective for participation in a project by THAV in Taipei (You are the Sunshine of my Life), it was later revived in early 2020. The collaboration between its two members has taken the initial form of observing the relationship between urban research and visual language, and they share a common interest in the contemporary urban culture-based critical reconstruction of the relationship between the public sphere, behavioral patterns, social norms and the practice of art.
They have co-curated several Seoul-based exhibitions, including New Cartographers (2015), Order/Disorder (2017) and Against Architecture (2018), while also collaborating on research and public arts projects. The main activity of the collective is collaborative research on the aspects of the world that have become fragmented as a result of neoliberal urban changes as manifested in art, architecture, culture and urbanism and the exploration of the process by which they are reproduced through visual language.
[Talk Intoroduction]
For nearly five years until Julien Coignet’s recent relocation from Seoul to Paris in February 2020, we toured together major Asian cities, such as Taipei, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Tokyo, and Busan, to gain firsthand insights into the process of urban spatial transformation. Born out of a sense of powerlessness felt by urban residents in the face of a violent reorganization of urban space, who have no choice but to endure or accept it, this project is an attempt to understand the nature of the force that is in action between places and people by examining its concrete manifestations in a real-world setting. As Julien and I are from different cultural backgrounds, him being European and me Asian, the questions we asked were not always the same, and this has helped broaden and enrich our perspectives. Meanwhile, when our views converged on issues, this had a solidifying effect on our ideas, similar to a knot tied with a cord made by twisting two strands of fiber. Underpinned by our shared interest in urban space, our collaboration has been focused on shedding light on its relationship to visual culture and exploring alternative values art can propose.
Concretely, this journey of ours was inspired by a desire to understand how and through what causal mechanisms “public spaces in urban areas” and the “behavior of people” control each other and the nature of the relationship it has with social and world order. Our urban research took the form of observation of everyday life in our respective immediate environments. In January this year, when the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Korea, we were conducting research on a project titled “The Private Occupation of Public Spaces and the Leak of Publicness,” which was about the functioning of screen culture in neoliberal urban spaces, increasingly controlled by capital. The situation has quickly escalated since then, with the outbreak of COVID-19 declared a global pandemic in the interim.
Much of our daily life has been disrupted and reorganized in the name of safety—our safety as individuals as well as that of our community and country. People all over the world are now routinely wearing face masks, and social distancing has become an accepted norm to protect ourselves and others and stem the spread of the pandemic. Many worked or are still working from home, meeting colleagues through videoconferencing programs like Zoom and resorting to other digital tools to avoid physical contact with people. As this goes on, public spaces in cities where public gatherings are banned have become mostly deserted. The fact that Julien returned to Paris shortly before the outbreak of COVID-19 is a direct background to this research project.
In light of these developments, we decided to explore new forms of post-pandemic spatial administration, designed to allow people to carry on with their daily life in a situation where one can no longer freely travel between Seoul and Paris, with restrictions imposed on the exchange between people and regions and across national borders. In Korea, where various urban control technologies, such as multimedia and digital device–based communications and CCTV, have long been integrated into the environment of its cities, it sufficed to use existing systems and expand the scope of their use to implement public health responses to the pandemic. This, however, was not at all the case in Europe. Europeans showed themselves much more resistant to restrictions on their physical movement. Any move toward the central control of citizens or use of technology-aided solutions was perceived as a new form of social discipline, abuse of state power, or infringement of civil liberties. When authorities’ attempt to control the movement of citizens proved unsuccessful, lockdowns were ordered across Europe, imposing fines on those who violate the order and placing severe restrictions on people’s access to public spaces (streets, squares, parks, etc.), including open-air spaces.
While in Korea, the normal use of public spaces resumed relatively quickly thanks to a data-driven public health response system, such was far from the case in France. In France, strict restrictions were implemented, with gatherings banned in and access denied to all public places for a prolonged period. At the same time, Korea’s well-designed, technology-aided COVID-19 response system, much praised by the international community, has its own problems. Fraught with potential big data human rights violation issues, this system raises questions about the limits of state power concerning both spatial control and surveillance over citizens. In Europe, public opinion is sensitive to potential human rights issues raised by big data-driven disease control methods. But, ironically, the public backlash only worsened the control of physical space, with police and military forces increasingly mobilized for its enforcement, suggesting that an Orwellian surveillance state is a real possibility.
On May 11, restrictions on movement, which had been in place for two months, were at last lifted in France. Although the freedom of movement was seemingly restored, new restrictive measures were introduced to reorganize urban space and dictate the movement and directions of the body, such as the rearrangement of space in coffee shops, bars, and restaurants and lines placed for one-way movement. In tandem, an expanding set of public digital services were rolled out, including the COVID-19 tracing app service. The French public’s wariness about these developments is also real, as attested to by street graffiti across Paris and other large cities, deriding the “new normal” in post-pandemic France and ridiculing the state authority (“COVID 1984,” “Stop Macrona Virus,” etc.). If there is one thing certain, it is that the COVID-19 pandemic has made latent issues of societies and the problem of inequality explode to the surface. Issues confronting our society are many, from natural disasters caused by the growth-driven global economy, ecological destruction, climate crisis, wealth inequality, class conflict, human rights of low-income workers, and caring for the elderly to the disruption of human rights caused by the hegemony of technology.
The reorganization of space, the behavior of citizenry, and the authorities’ use of technology in response to the pandemic, as observed in Paris, a model modern-era capital, and Seoul, a late-modern city, show how closely cities and technology are linked in today’s urban spatial control projects. Such a shift is likely to bring about changes in our way of perceiving and experiencing the world, as well as transform the way we experience art and the nature and aspects of images. Our conversations, between Julien and me, at present taking place exclusively through videoconferencing, are about the “rearrangement of public spaces,” “technology-assisted pandemic containment and urban culture,” “noncontact society and face mask politics,” and “visual culture in the face of reorganized publicness.”
– Retracing Buro (Somi Sim, Julien Coignet)
* COVID-19 Timeline: Korea, France (January–August 2020)
By Retracing Buro (Somi Sim, Julien Coignet)
The COVID-19 timeline by Somi Sim and Julien Coignet summarizes major developments in the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic in Korea and France, where they are respectively based. The pandemic has resulted in various restrictions in wide-reaching areas of our lives, from cities where we live, institutions and systems, space, and technology to goods, distribution systems, education, and travel, with their strength varying depending on how the crisis develops. This new restrictive environment prompts a reflection on how this virus is implicated in the way our space is controlled and what influence this has and will have on the world.
Re-tracing Buro 