Strange Meetings

Strange Meetings testifies to the impossibility of maintaining clear boundaries by tracing entangled bilateral policies against the spread of STD (sexually transmitted diseases) among US soldiers stationed in South Korea in the 1970s.
The work documents a former STD treatment facility, which served to isolate bodies presumed contaminated from those deemed clean. A host of strange meetings, the site today, however, materially bears witness to the entangled relations behind its establishment and the impossibility of creating neat separations. The decomposing building is being encroached upon by rubbish and surrounding vegetation. Knotted together, each feed on each other, breaking down distinctions between inside and outside, architecture and debris. Beyond being an abandoned site in decay, it now serves as a backdrop for another strange meeting: A performance takes place behind the building each weekend, inadvertently complicating the relationship between past and present and diffusing the reading of the site by overriding but potentially also purging its history.