final project





Ellie Koo
Crash Course in Fibers (FALL 25)


Origins


(background: water from wolmido island, stock image)

We did these shiburi dyeing techniques with indigo at the very beginning of the semester.  

Last spring, I was working on a project in a documentary class about my father. I was born in Incheon, but grew up in South Florida. My dad has always had a fixation on the ocean and I spent a lot of time looking at it with him, waiting for him to catch fish or return from the car with forgotten snorkel equipment. 

I remember visiting my partner in Chicago, my first time consciously creating memories there (I had been for a layover with my family when I was 11). I stared at the water with them and I couldn’t believe how large it was. I had never seen a lake so big and vast as if it were a sea, waves and all. I tried to imagine land on the other side. 

I wondered if my dad was imagining Korea on the other side of all these waves we’ve witnessed together. I wondered if I had too.

Are.na board to my family’s archives of ocean photos. 



All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.” - Toni Morrison
The indigo remembers how it was folded.

In Experimental Media Workshop, a 16mm class I am taking this semester, we had a found footage project. Rod (the professor) ordered a random box of film. A lot of it was old, and to no surprise, racist. Lots of soldiers, old british men, the queen. A racist cartoon of an asian man, angry at the white protagonist for abandoning him at a scary motel. 

We watched this one news reel. 

There was a hurricane in Florida, like the ones I’ve seen. Big waves. Dusty palm trees. Terrifying, but beautiful.

Somewhere far away, Korea. Words “Liberation” followed by images of korean people searched, hands up, ordered into lines. People in crowds, upheavel, “political unrest”. Why in claims of freedom is there violence?







I did some more research on what this could have been in history. Relevant links can be found here.

“WAR IN THE ASIA PACIFIC”



artists inspirations slides

The Project


Main concepts
- Creating Countermemory (”Foucault defined counter-memory as an individual's resistance against the official versions of historical continuity) of “Korean Liberation” after WWII

- Power Struggles Korea has through cultural exchanges (Hallyu - “The Korean Wave”,  soft power moves by the Korean government) / military power

- Water, the Ocean as a landscape of imagination, questioning, curiosity, fear (Waves as a motif)

- Indigo as Memory (it remembers the tension and the folds)


The fibers component:
I would like to make a bojagi screen cloth because

  • of the formal qualities, creating different sections for different video channels of projection
  • something about the seams, about hiding something... about hidden histories and discontinuities in the patchwork and pattern
  • I want to make it very large and long, so if it was hung up it would go onto the floor and start to get scrunched and folded up as if it was reaching to the viewer
  • to continue a fibers tradition from my culture

browse through different bojagi cloths below. images are movable




Things I need to work on and consider:

MEDIA VISUALS

Possibly adding more channels. Splitting things apart. Having them move through different panels.

Yesterday I had a informal critique at home where I showed the video and served some soup. A friend had mentioned how Roosevelt has said

SPEAK SOFTLY WITH A BIG STICK

as a reflection of the US’s policy about starting war under the guise of peace.

Make more channels of text. Rea Tajiri, a professor from fma told me when she was watching it that the words seem like apparitions, they appear and disappear in legibility, struggling to speak.

AUDIO

Current Ideas:

I played it for an audience with this song and I’m kind of obsessed with it now. Music copyright is horrid though. Going to ask for advice.