SANGHEE, Conversational Map for Encounters, 2024, Roll paper attached to plywood structure, Stickers, dimension variable ©SANGHEE

In the exhibition 《Conversational Map for Encounters: Bugs of Nostalgia》, the artist plays the one-on-one conversational game Bugs of Nostalgia with the audience, which actively references the format of TRPG.

As its name suggests, the conversational game consists of conversations constructed by game-like rules, inviting the audience to perform as a player. In about one and a half hours, the audience can freely move their character, suggest new backgrounds and stories, and personate loosely as a character.


SANGHEE, Conversational Map for Encounters, 2024, Roll paper attached to plywood structure, Stickers, dimension variable ©SANGHEE

The game is set in a fictional hometown where the walls, bridge piers, and floors collapse due to perilous termites invading the city. The characters made by players explore the hometown, which is illustrated schematically in a visual map. The audience marks their steps or adds stickers to the map installed along the walls of the exhibition hall.

The revised map then turns into the background for the next player, creating a stratum of overlapped multiple stories. A map always represents "reality" drawn and revised from a communal narrative involving communal politics, power struggles, and agreement. This "communal" reality asymmetrically forms through various power relations. However, a realistic map presents itself as total reality, keeping silent about the underlying asymmetrical relations.

This performance shows that the power and fantasy relations invisible in a realistic map can come to the forefront in an impractical map prepared for a fictional story. By competing or reaching an agreement with the artist, the participating audience creates a story that unfolds horizontally in the spatial dimension. The map goes beyond the functional purpose of showing locations.

It involves predictions about potential dangers and the possibility of new encounters, actions based on those predictions, and emotional reactions and interventions imagined. Conversational Map for Encounters  is completed through thirty performances. The work focuses on the communal map that serves as the basis for creating communal fiction. The discursive interaction based on that map makes the process of creating the map an aesthetic experience.

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