<The Solitary House Project> shows the process of adapting to the new environment with strange neighbors I faced due to a move. The community art project includes my photographs of my daily lives.
People I meet for the first time asks me the following question. It is like their greeting to me.
“Where do you live?”
“I live in Songjoeng-dong...”
“Where is it?”
“Well, it is between Gunja-dong and Seongdu-dong.”
“Aha.”
I live in a neighborhood which is not that famous, so sometimes this kind of question bothers me. When I don’t want to answer in detail, I just say ambiguously. I moved to Songjeong-dong in 2015. The first impression of the neighborhood was that it has somewhat inconvenient amenities and old buildings. In a word, unobtrusive. We moved to the neighborhood because of my husband’s convenient commuting and relatively low cost of housing. So I have always thought that we can leave the neighborhood whenever we are ready for the better conditions. Thus I did not expect too much. In the mean time, I could face several situations to look into the daily lives of my neighbors, which made me curious about them. That is how I started <The Solitary House Project>. Thanks to this project, I could listen to the news of the neighborhood and get along with the neighbors. Songjeong-dong has become my precious neighborhood to live in. When I take a walk on Songjeong Embankment Road, I can see the old small houses with long histories. It seems the windows on the road with lyrical beauty tell me about certain lives. In my neighborhood Songjeong-dong, many various neighbors are living their lives. I still wait for them to come out with the histories of their lives.
‘The Bench’, ‘The Neighbor’, ‘The Neighborhood’, the three consecutive series of the project were proceeded at intervals of one year. The last project, <The Solitary House Project No 3. The Neighborhood> was shown to the public from October 6th to November 17th of 2018. The photographs of the project were displayed at the pop-up gallery of the community center and the bus station of Geonyoung Apartment of Songjeong-dong in Seoul. I tried to gather the sceneries of the neighborhood and the neighbors in one space.