Tying the Knots 매듭 땋기
Tying the Knots emerges from my thinking around nets of dependence: the recognition that we do not exist as autonomous subjects, but are continually formed through our entanglements with other bodies, materials, environments, histories, and desires. Against the promise of utopia as a harmonious world, I am interested in encounter as something unfinished, embodied, and involved. The installation does not propose an ideal community or a seamless space of togetherness. Instead, it remains provisional and contingent, shaped by tension, misalignment, chance, openness and the individual bodies that enter into relation with it. Dependence here is not a condition to overcome, but a material and social reality through which other forms of solidarity and shelter might emerge.
The installation can be understood as an extension of my body: a kind of spider web that stretches like spectral limbs that remain porous and sticky to whatever may encounter it. Like a web, it is open rather than enclosing, simultaneously fragile and tensile, dependent upon points of contact and tension. Its form is in constant state of transition, never entirely determined in advance: it grows through the participation of others. The steel frame establishes a provisional body, while the fabrics, knots, gestures, and movements of participants continually extend and transform it. In this sense, the work is not a utopian model of collective life but an architecture of encounter: a structure that invites bodies, materials, memories, and desires to meet without requiring them to become the same. Its openness is therefore not an absence of structure, but a deliberate vulnerability to what and who might enter and disrupt.
Knotting here becomes the central gesture through which this interdependence is remembered and made tangible. Knots are prehistoric somato-mnemonic craft language: it records touch, intensity, duration, and the coming together of disparate threads. Through the simple act of tying one piece of fabric to another, participants inscribe a thought, memory, or desire into a growing material network. These gestures accumulate without producing a singular narrative or fixed meaning; instead, they form a collective memory through relation. Each knot depends upon other knots, just as each strand derives strength from its connection to others. The resulting net is therefore not simply a performance of provisional solidarity but relational knowing: a living record of encounters that co-produces new relational modes and queer empathy. Against the fantasy of utopian resolution, Tying the Knots proposes the twining of transition and dependence itself as a site of possibility: we become with and through one another.
(Read more: "Parents and Art" by Renan Laru-An)
Photo credit: 이강선 Kangsun Lee