Thanks to the Hanyang team of professors and friends who organize these great tours!

Walk: Gyeongie Line
Talk: Infrastructure Regeneration as Urban Common
폐선부지 재생과 도시 공유재
Date: 1st Sept 2015 (5pm~9pm)
Subject: Gyeongie Line Park

Infrastructure Regeneration as Urban Common

Gyeongie Line Park Presentation
Young-Bum Reigh, Prof._Kyonggi Univ.
Lee Nam-Jin, Project Manager_Dongsimwon

6.00 pm : Walk
Gyeongie Line Park from Gongdeok-dong to Yeonnam-dong
8.00 pm : Talk
Yeonnam-dong Linear Park

Yongusil 33: The Sun, the Arrow, and Benjamin Joinau
BY ROBERT WINSTANLEY-CHESTERS | MAY 07, 2014 | 
Click on the title to see the original article.

As academics and analysts, we read a large track of material and attend a large number of workshops, conferences, and other such intellectual gatherings. At the Sixth World Congress of Korean Studies in September of 2012, held at the idyllic Academy of Korean Studies in Seongnam, I heard a conference presentation that stopped me in my conceptual tracks and supported a dizzying connectivity between concepts I had previously absorbed and historical material I was currently processing for my own doctoral dissertation.

Benjamin Joinau of EHESS, Paris delivered a presentation entitled “The Sun and the Arrow: A Topo-myth Analysis of Pyongyang” that turned my head. Joinau utilized the core analytical tool box of psycho-geography while coupling it to an acute sense of space and place akin to the most urgent and forthright of an anthropologically minded activist: urban geographers.

Pyongyang lived and breathed in Joinau’s presentation, its histoire and terroire vibrating in conjoined narratological connection. Methodologically activated through a spatialization of Durrand’s diurnal and nocturnal mythodology via James Duncans’s socio-semiotoics, Joinau’s psycho-geographic reconfiguration of urban Pyongyang’s physical and spiritual axes was extraordinary. We watched and listened as he revisioned the construction and organization of the physical spaces of Pyongyang from those previous and historically familiar, grounded first in the needs and structures of the Yi dynasty, (“Pyongyang retained the dense and diversified fabric of its ancient origins….”) and secondarily in the co-option, ambition, and coloniality of Imperial Japan and submissive Chosun, through the disruption and destruction of war to new, more assertive re-orderings undertaken at the behest of revolution.

Pyongyang and North Korea’s revolution was to play out in its urban geography, ”etching the official ideology… into the city’s layout.” It was to be commemorated in monolith and edifice and writ large in monumentality. This was urban geography manifesting not only revolution and ambition, but inherently and almost primarily glory. Joinau has envisaged an urban landscape and landscapes of actuated, embedded, acute glorification. Here a geographic and “ideological polygon” form axes of orientation echoing what Joinau terms “the sun” and the arrow.” Pyongyang is thus seen as a city “… symbolically and politically under the… eye of the Father, the Sun on Earth.”

Joinau’s work through this intriguing interplay of symbol, semiotics, mythos, and cityscape provides a fascinating physical urban echo to Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung’s more theoretic conceptualization of a North Korean politics of theatrics and charisma. Joinau has surely produced the vital kernel of what must be an absolutely key work of scholarship addressing the impact of politics and mythic narratology upon the physical landscapes of urban environment, twinning in the wake of Kwon and Chung, urban glory with charismatic rurality.

The piece can be found in the new issue of the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (part of SungkyunKwan University in Seoul’s Academy of East Asian Studies), edited by the esteemed Dutch Koreanist Boudewijn Walraven.

My paper "Topo-mythanalysis of Pyongyang" has been published in the Sungkyunkwan Journal of Korean Studies, volume 14, number 1 of April 2014 (downloadable in PDF).

http://sjeas.skku.edu/backissue/current_issue.jsp

For more maps to complement the reading of the article, you can visit the "materials" menu of this site.

"Ports d'attache" spécial Séoul sur TV5 Canada demain 29 avril.

The TV program "Ports d'attache" will feature a special episode about Seoul 29th April 2014 on TV5 Canada.

http://ports.tv5.ca/2014/index.php?page=seoul

Presentation "Patrimoines, hauts lieux et lieux de mémoire dans les régimes de visibilité de Pyongyang" (Cultural heritage, landmarks and lieux de mémoire in the regimes of visibility of Pyongyang) at the international conference: "Capitals of the Korean World', Paris, EHESS, 12-13 September 2013.

I am going to make a presentation at the following conference "Capital cities of the Korean world", Paris, EHESS, 13 september 2013 :
14h00 - 14h30 : Présentation 1 - Benjamin Joinau (EHESS)
Patrimoines et lieux de mémoire à Pyongyang dans les « régimes de visibilité » de la capitale

I will develop on the "regimes of visibility" (visibility, invisibility, non-visibility and distanciation in urban context) in the case of Pyongyang, especially concerning the landmarks and "lieux de mémoire" as they are shown (or not) to tourists. This study follows and complements my former paper "Topo-mythanalysis of Pyongyang". It is part of a larger project intending to study the question of distance and regimes of visibility in cities, with a comparison between Seoul and Pyongyang.