My Utopia

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
21:43 minutes

Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea. After Equatorial Guinea and North Korea signed a treaty in the early 1970s, Nguema had sent his young daughter to live in North Korea, where she and her siblings were adopted by Kim Il-Sung, the first Supreme Leader of North Korea. After Nguema was overthrown during a military coup and later executed in 1979, Monique continued to live in Pyongyang until 1994. My Utopia interweaves actual documentary footage from Macías’ life with highly choreographed, cinematically shot scenes of actors playing child and adult versions of Macías, as well as North Korean figures from her life recounting their memories of her. The characters switch between languages, voices, and styles of performance, and Che occasionally breaks the fourth wall by revealing the staged sets in which the actors perform. This story takes place within a Russian nesting doll of performativity and narrative modes; one can never be quite sure of what is fact or fiction. In a continuation of Che’s research on the relationships between African countries and North Korea, My Utopia is formally tight but conceptually expansive, raising incisive questions about nationality, nativity, belonging, and the ways in which the kaleidoscopic truth is conditioned on history and politics. As we are asked to consider both the extraordinary circumstances of Macías’ life and the ways in which the North Korean social apparatus has made her simultaneously significant and alien, Che extends this interrogation beyond the state lines of North and South Korea, Africa and Asia. After all, how much of our individual sense of self is inherited from the state’s account of its own history? How much of our “truth” is performed, how much of it moves diasporically, and how much agency do we have in its construction?

Che Onejoon started working with photography in mandatory military service as an evidence photographer for the South Korean Combat Police recording different incidents for proof. Working with film, photographs, installations, and archives, Che’s research-based works deal with specific places of Korean society that connote the social and political changes that penetrate modern to contemporary history of the Korean peninsula. Studying the ruins of militarized modernity, Che presents the traces of erasures as sites of negation, disorder, and desertion.

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