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KYONG PARK
Artist / curator, Detroit / New York
Born in 1955 in South Korea. Studied architecture at the University of Michigan. 1982-98: founder and Director of Store Front for Art and Architecture, New York. 1997: curator of Images of the Future: The Architecture of A New Geography for the Kaanggju Biennale in Korea. Since 1998: founder and Director of the ICUE (International Center for Urban Ecology) in Detroit. 2001: taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and the Rhode Island School of Design / City University of New York. 2001: Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Exhibition contributions: Archilab, Orleans (2001); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2002); Baden Art Association, Karlsruhe (2003).
Shrinking cities
Starting Point /// Whether in the USA, Britain, or Belgium, Finland, Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, or China: everywhere, cities are shrinking. The dramatic development in eastern Germany since 1989, which has led to more than a million empty apartments and to the abandoning of countless industrial parks and social and cultural facilities, has proven to be no exception, but a general pattern of our civilization.
Shrunken cities contradict the image, familiar since the Industrial Revolution, of the "boomtown", a big city characterized by constant economic and demographic growth. Shrunken cities spur a reconsideration not only of traditional ideas of the European city, but also of the future development of urban worlds.
The drastic changes in cities caused by shrinking thus present not only an economic and social, but also a cultural challenge. Urban shrinking can hardly be affected by city planning, and it brings numerous problems. New types of cities arise; we do not yet have ways of thinking or of using their specific character.
Lost Highway Expedition
A multitude of individuals, groups and institutions will move roughly along as well as accross the unfinished “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity”, connecting nine capital cities in the Western Balkans.
Lost Highway Expedition is a collaboration between Centrala Foundation for Future Cities and School of Missing Studies together with partners.
Experience, documentation and projects developed from the expedition will lead to exhibitions, publications and symposia of “Europe Lost and Found” in Stuttgart and Ljubljana in 2007 as well as conference "Europe Lost and Found" at Columbia university in New York in the Fall of 2006. Lost Highway Expedition will begin in Ljubljana, and travel through Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Pristina, Tirana, Podgorica to conclude in Sarajevo, comprised of two days of events at each city and one day of travel in between. The expedition is meant to generate new projects, new art works, new networks, new architecture and new politics based on experience and knowledge found along the highway.
Europe Lost and Found
is an interdisciplinary and multi-nationally based research project to articulate and imagine the current evolution of new and transforming borders and territories of Europe. The subject is the continent of immigration, and its depopulation and aging, and the need for redefinition of states, sovereignties and citizenships. Challenged is the established belief and practice of nation-state, including non-representative and technocratic construction of European Union yet to vision more open and alternative definitions for populous in movements. The rejection of constitutional referendum and the riots in France signal the contradiction between homogeneous and multiple identities, the fluidity of capital and containment of labor, the liberation of individuals and their restrictions under sovereignty. Clearly, Europe cannot subsist by itself, and is already being redefined by “the others” in its quest for a self-identity. In such contexts, ELF suggests the future of Europe is best seen in the very place where the nation-state concept first collapsed in Europe, the Western Balkan.