My Day is Sold by the Hour March 2024
Sound: Excerpt from "My Day is Sold by the Hour" by Suk Hong https://endonesia-studio.bandcamp.com/track/my-day-is-sold-by-the-hour
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I was asked to make a video for a segment of music artist Suk Hong's single, "My Day is Sold by the Hour." This is the composition I created within the week or so I had before its release. The full track takes one to many places. Its official description makes note of where it was recorded - Seoul's Guro district, the largest digital industrial complex in South Korea.
In my initial correspondence with Suk, he had mentioned that he started from a realization of alienation - his body "an instrument to a specific value system [he] inherited and adopted". He also sent me many personally captured videos as reference - a fog-filled view of the city from above, a park on a rainy winter night, a construction vehicle, frogs in the perilous path of pedestrians, a living room with a celadon curtain cloth.
Relating to the title of the song and this locational specificity, I became entirely focused on the topic of labor - simultaneously around Guro's history in soft industries and textiles, its shift to electronics and technology in the 70s and 80s, as well as the constant and rapid pace of construction to this day. A landscape and a room share a backdrop of structures, just as a demarcated lot disappears into a living space that eventually replaces it. I try to mirror the simultaneous spatial precision and abstraction that occurs within Suk's field recordings and arrangements.
Focusing on S. Korea's history and present day of unionbusting and hostility towards its own workers, I thought about the plight of those represented by Jeon Tae-il, the sewing worker and labor activist who killed himself by fire in 1970 - as well as Yang Hoe-dong, the construction union leader who also self-immolated just last year in protest of anti-union charges. The Ministry of Employment and Labor's modification to its administrative definition of overtime this past January, resulting in the technical legality of 21.5 hour workdays, is a reminder of an unabiding struggle.
I depict a purposeless, lithified city stripped of people and things, as the illusion of progress at the cost of its own society and sovereignty gives way to a simple truth and an emptiness that has been rattling on for an entire history. To continue to learn from the peripheries inward towards this desiccated core is the only way forward - now more than ever.
"That's like that Fred Hampton shit: he'd be like, 'The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?' But, that position in which you have no place, no home, that you're literally off center, off the track, unlocatable, I think it's important [...] 'Where can I get a better job than this? Where can I get a better house than this?' He was claiming the location that really wasn't his, but what he was really claiming was the possibility of location. And Malcolm's like, 'No! I'll be out in the field. Not only in the hope of something more, something other, than what you think you have but also because there's something in the field; that even in deprivation, there's an opening.'"
- Fred Moten, The Undercommons