Migration Stories Project

The Migration Stories Project documents the stories of migrants living in the southern part of Gyeonggi Province. These stories continue through a webpage to be produced in 2022 and an exhibition to be held at the Hwaseong Cultural Center in Hwaseong-si, Gyeonggi-do in December of the same year. With this project, I want to tell the stories of migrants who have come from afar, but are now close neighbors and friends. Through this project, I was able to meet neighbors who are staying in Korea and talk with them about their lives, experiences, and homes in Korea. In fact, the experiences of the migrants I met were much more varied than I expected. Each one of them had a different story, and the time spent settling down and trying to blend into the unfamiliar environment of Korea passed without any time to record it in their busy lives. In my efforts not to forget my hometown and my desire to make it my new home, my daily life was busily blending with memories of the past and the present. Some shared experiences in unfamiliar spaces and stories of older locations I didn't know about. Others shared a sense that we were doing something that wasn't different, shared thoughts and emotions that came from life experiences, and those stories were just stories of human life, and these were all my stories. The Migration Stories Project was created so that the audience can listen to the stories of migrants from various backgrounds through an exhibition that spreads them out in one space in the form of a web page that the audience clicks on and proceeds with. The stories of people living in the strange space of Korea over thousands of kilometers reveal memories of their hometowns, memories of present-day Korea, industrial sites in Korea, and various landscapes and objects. I wanted to draw these images on the screen and zoom in to look into their memories. We want to make time to focus and listen to the distant but close stories that we haven't heard but have always been around us.