This summer’s Cover Story features twelve photographs by Swan Park that were taken during the day that curator Sooyoung Leam and artist–filmmaker Yeoreum Jeong spent together in Seoul for the nineteenth dispatch of ‘Incidents (of Travel)’. Reload (or resize) the page to display a different image.

The episode centres on Yongsan, a district at the heart of Seoul, and a conflicted territory that served as the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army during Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula (1910–1945), and then hosted a vast U.S. military base. It is forbidden to enter the zone, which appears as a blank spot on the map. Yet by using the AR location-based mobile game Pokémon GO, Yeoreum and Sooyoung explore ways to travel both physically and virtually during a timely moment when the military base is being relocated to the nearby city of Pyeongtaek, and the territory awaits a new life as a memorial park.

By combining the socio-political history of Yongsan with the personal and micro-history of Yeoreum’s everyday life, the Seoul edition offers new ways to engage with the city’s shifting symbolic landscape. The episode departs from Yeoreum’s ‘Graeae: A Stationed Idea’ (2020), a film constructed entirely out of found images and found footage.

Since 2012, ‘Incidents (of Travel)’ has explored the chartered day-long itinerary as a format of artistic encounter and an extended conversation between curators and artists. As a web-based format, it has been hosted and produced by Kadist Online since 2016.