Ina Kwon – Piles of Earth and Rubble

In Gyeongju, South Korea, tumuli dating back to the Kingdom of Silla can be found all over the city. After years in oblivion, many of these burial mounds were reconstructed in the 1970s in a bid to link President Park Chung-Hee’s South Korea with the Kingdom of Silla (57 BC – AD 935), a period that was traditionally glorified as rich and powerful. For the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, the city’s Schuttberg, a great pile of rubble left behind by World War II, was recast as an essential element of a landscape park. The entire complex was laid out on it with the idea of showing West Germany as being open to the world. The debris of the buildings destroyed in the war is buried under the park’s manicured grass. Ina Kwon uses photographs and texts to depict her travels and describe the research she carried out in these two locations, in which artificial hills are deployed to bury, expose, construct and rewrite history. The book consists of two sections – Gyeongju and Munich – which are printed in juxtaposition at 180° to one another so that the book can be read from either direction.

204 pages, 14.5 × 21 cm, softcover, Spector Books (Leipzig).