Anyang Women's Agenda (2010)
Suzanne Lacy with Raul Vega
Male voices still dominate public discourse and practices of international relations, nation and city building in Korea. Women’s perspectives are evident in the privacy of the home or among other women, but their concerns are rarely critical to the formation of policies. The 2010 election of six women to the Anyang City Council was unprecedented and set the stage for the collaboration between Lacy, local activists, and women politicians. Seventy-five women representing diverse classes and occupations participated in small impromptu staged conversations in environments as varied as a recycling center and a swimming pool. As the transactions of daily life moved around them—recycling machines and water aerobic classes—the women discussed intersections between gender and political/social themes, their bodies as a disjunctive, dislocated, and potentially subversive representation of exclusion. This public performance in fifteen acts was later represented by a photographic installation in a park in the center of the city. At the opening, 90 women from the small groups spoke together in the lobby of City Hall, including politicians in their explorations of gendered public space and its relationship to political agendas. Sound recordings of the small group conversation yielded a material roadmap for setting a four-year woman’s agenda for the city, presented to the mayor and members of the city council in the performative convening in City Hall.
Produced by Kyong Park, director of the Anyang Public Art Project for City of Anyang, Korea. Photos by Raul Vega. Production team and advisors: Kyungnyun Son, Boseul Kim, Jey Hwang and Dr. Lisa Kim Davis.