Galmae - WOMADelaide 2023

c'est pas là, c'est par là / it's not that way, it's this way

Organized with the support of the French Embassy in Australia.

How does a crowd move? When we’re alone, do we move differently from when we’re among others? These are the kinds of questions that struck Juhyung Lee during a rally in Seoul in 2015. With his performance installation c’est pas là, c’est par là (it’s not that way, it’s this way), Lee transforms a crowd of spectators into a problem-solving collective as they come together to unravel a tangled labyrinth of strings resembling a cat’s cradle. Moving under and over strands of string, each rolling their own ball, the spectators become actors in the performance, and in the process, become more than the sum of individuals. At the end of the string, does one find the ‘we’?

What is it About?

A string installation like a freshly woven spider's web reconfigures the public space. One takes a stone and starts to roll up the string bound to it, another walks into the middle of the labyrinth and contemplates the unraveling tangle. Passing over and under the threads, the spectators, who have become actors in this performance, help each other. The space becomes a meeting place. The individual becomes a community.

This collective work, full of emotions, is none other than the first personal project of the South Korean artist Juhyung Lee, previously experimented at the Pohang Street Art Festival in Pohang (South Korea), at the festival Les Tombées de la Nuit in Rennes (France), at the Chalon dans la rue festival in Chalon-sur-Saône (France) and at the Out There Festival in Great Yarmouth (United Kingdom) among others. After discovering street art through the French company Générik Vapeur, Juhyung Lee became interested in the spatial scale and the place of the individual in society. It is from these contemplations that he creates this social but also political installation.

Credits to the French Embassy in the United States.