Trans Office Theater You Play Together (You, 遊, 類)

A Social Art Project by Kyongju Park

- Artists’ Social Performance about Artistic Labor

There is no future for government-led social enterprises. Only empty voices about a sustainable future and job creation for marginalized people, etc. exist. Unfortunately, cultural and art companies are not companies unless large companies accumulating absolute wealth in Korea transform themselves first. The companies are self-employed businesses that one or two artists take the lead in creating artworks. Therefore, artists are self-employed. Art is not the business manufacturing products but a special work creating values. Most cultural and art social entrepreneurs will fall behind from being self-employed to bankrupts and to the homelessunless the government’s awareness about cultural and art social entrepreneurs changes.

Am I so negative? No, it is just fact. What fact? The fact that “artists are self-employed”. Art needed to be business so needed to have spaces and people. So employees were hired. Even though spaces and people were prepared, products were not manufactured from 9 am to 6 pm since art industry is not manufacturing industry. That is because art is not a manufacturing industry. Let’s just admit the truth! The truth that artists are artists and profits are not created although art factories are built and artistic laborers are hired with a higher cost. The artists can create other products than artworks to maintain the spaces, give salaries that they promised to the laborers, become administrators to earn funds from the government, and play a CEO role for certain period of time. However, such temporary methods and contradictory dramatic situations are not sustainable.

Salad, a nomadic social enterprise, decided to admit the fact that we are self-employed. A role of CEO, bookkeeper, regular artistic laborer, non-regular artistic laborer, temporarily occupy unused spaces in cities for eight hours from 9 am to 6 pm a day to work for a social enterprise. They practice and work in unused spaces in cities. Their daily works will be so-called social performances. We will not be embarrassed but create artworks even though nobody asks for our artworks. Every space in cities is our stage and every citizen drifting in cities is our actors and actresses and audience. We, artists, will not be bankrupt anymore since we admit the fact that we are self-employed and return back to true artists. Finding identity as an artist and creator through , a new experimental art project. Sending the warning message that artists of this era become administrators for making a living. They are the objectives of this project.

How: One video clip will be completed and uploaded daily in the project page in vimeo. 
Period: April 2015 ~ March 2017 (two years) 
Concept creator & Director: Kyongju Park 
Performances will be run non-regularly online real time during the project period. Newsletter will be published and distributed quarterly. 
Project participants: Salad members and others

 Kyongju park

Kyong-ju Park (born 1968, seoul)  worked as a visual artist, filmmaker, playwright, theater director, journalist and social designer. Her major works are 'Migrant Workers in Berlin' (photo, 1999), 'Nurses Dispatched to Germany' (photo, 2000), 'Memory in Germany - Miners Dispatched to Germany' (video installation, 2000) 'Migrant Workers in Seoul' (photo, 2001), 'What is Life? - Migrant Workers' Music Project'(project music album, 2002), 'In a Dream Country - Migrant Women's Lives' (Art book published by Women Migrants Human Rights Center, 2004), 'Migrant Workers' Performance for Election Campaign' (performance, 2004), ‘Do You Remember Me?’ (lecture performance, 2010), ‘Yeosu,Beginning, Middle, and the End ’ (media experimental play, 2010), Ran's Diary (media experimental play, 2011), Future Story (media experimental play, 2012), Theater without Actor (media experimental play, 2013), Migrant worker's broadcast(internet alternative media, 2005~2009), multilingual broadcat SALADTV(internet alternative media, 2009~2012), Social enterprise SALAD(trans-cultural performing arts group, 2009~ present).