STATEMENT OF WORK

I am porous. And I am moved by you

“…at the heart of any language, then, is the poetic productivity of expressive speech. A living language is continually made and remade, woven out of the silence by those who speak…”

The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram

- - - -

I was listening. Grandma told me how secretive women in her family were about food recipes. She told me there was a secret step in our family’s makgeolli-making that only her grandma knew. Her grandma would tell other people to leave the room to keep her secret from leaving the family. I asked my grandma if she knew what that is. There was a brief silence. She said, “It died with her.”

In 1916 (when Japan colonized Korea), the Japanese government banned household liquor production. The law read:

• Homemade alcohol cannot be gifted or sold to others.
• When the current alcohol producer is deceased, their successors cannot continue any alcohol production.

Then the Korean war happened. My grandma fled from North Korea. Then there was post-war poverty. Then my grandma sold tofu at the market.

- - - -

A month ago, I was on the phone again with grandma. I told her that I have already made more than 16 batches of makgeolli after she taught me how to make it. She said that is a lot of work. I said, “yeah”. And there was a brief silence.

The taste of this silence is faint bitterness. It lingers after I swallow the uncomfortable feelings down. I have never tasted our family’s makgeolli. She only told me what she learned when she was younger. I don’t know whether what I have been making is even close to what she has tasted a long time ago. I am trying to achieve a taste that I don’t know.

- - - -

Colonization: The formation of compact population groups of the same type of microorganism as the colonies that develop when a cell begins reproducing.

- - - -

I was listening. I had a field recorder in my hand and a headphone playing the amplified sound of my surroundings. I was pointing the mic toward the river in front of me. But all I heard was the road behind me.

I heard a car accelerating in the distance. The pitch of the engine went higher until it dropped with a gear shift. It ascended again as the sound got further away from me. I then heard the drone of tires rolling on the asphalt pavement. It sounded like ocean waves hitting the shore, not the river water splashing on the clay bluff I was standing on. 

I had walked on the riverbank for hours. My feet got heavier with every step as the clay and silt clanged to the bottom of my boots and tried to hold me down to the earth. I remembered Julia, my pottery teacher, telling me that clay has memory. While a potter can mould soft clay to any shape they desire, clay sometimes tries to go back to the shape it was in. I imagined the same clay sticking to the boots of the first Hudson Bay Company workers as they set up their fort. And it probably did the same for the people who walked there before that. 

- - - -

I am reminded of how I, too, participate in the system that has its lineage in the power that created laws to remove Indigenous people and paved over this land. They saw this land empty. Empty of people. Empty of relationships. 

- - - -

The invisible beings that turned rice into alcohol have been nurturing and receiving care from this land for a long time. They are still alive in makgeolli, making it more acidic and alcoholic every day. I wish they would become a part of your biome. So you leave here with the ones who remember this land.

- - - 

I watched an interview of a makgeolli brewer who dedicated most of his life to the craft. He said that the drink is not his creation, but the organisms’ that turn rice into something more complex. He said he doesn’t know anything about turning rice into alcohol. He only knows how to care for beings that do. He, then, expressed gratitude to invisible beings that provide us with something we appreciate. 

I wondered how his makgeolli tasted.

- - - -

Food Chain: It reminds me that I, too, am a link in this relationship of eating and getting eaten. But I hate it because the terms in the chain (producer, consumer, and decomposer) confuse my role in ecology and capitalist society. Humans are consumers in the food chain. We only consume what producers create through photosynthesis. But I am told that I am a producer and a creator. In capitalism, I comfortably reside in my dual role as a creator and an endless consumer.

- - - -

What would my practice look like when I try to learn from fungi and yeast? Fungi connect the forest. They support other organisms. They also act as a channel of communication. Bacteria and yeast circulate nutrients.

I am listening to inaudible languages. This listening is a receptivity to relate to others. I am listening to the silences in the food knowledge that got erased. I am listening to the violent history of the land that is buried. I am listening to the breathing of microorganisms that cohabit the land. They are heard through relationships. Similar to sound travelling as waves in the air, I listen to vibrancy in relationships. 

- - - -

These beings exhaled into makgeolli turning it alcoholic. As the liquid travels toward my intestine, alcohol sips into my veins. When it reaches the lung, it leaks out of my body, mixed with my breath. 

I am porous. And I am moved by you.