Sojin Chun | Photographs | ReMaking KM6
The photographs in Re-Making KM6 illustrate my journey home to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for the first time in 17 years. When I left Bolivia, I was thirteen years old. The five glorious years that I spent in Santa Cruz had marked my cultural identity in a significant way. Perhaps my deep affection for Bolivia was circumstantial, I left a tropical childhood paradise to encounter the dead cold winter of Canada. My memories of my former home include sunshine playing with my friends in the nearby jungle and falling asleep to the sounds of wild monkeys. For me, this trip was necessary to encounter my past as an adult and to experience the realities of a city loaded with political and social implications much different from my present home in Toronto.
My return to Santa Cruz was an important personal journey to discover a part of my cultural hybridity. I was born in Seoul, Korea; grew up in Bolivia; and moved to Canada as a teenager. My hybrid identity and my social position returning home as an artist, a researcher, a former resident, a foreigner, between an outsider and an insider complicates the way in which the photographs presented are read. The images also take on different meanings depending on the context in which they are shown. When an installation of this work was shown in Bolivia, the audience identified with the people and the places in the photographs. This body of work became a portrayal of “home” for the viewers. Upon return to Canada, I must contextualize the place where the photographs were taken as well as the people in the portraits in relation to my own personal narrative, which informs a larger social context of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
My return to Santa Cruz was an important personal journey to discover a part of my cultural hybridity. I was born in Seoul, Korea; grew up in Bolivia; and moved to Canada as a teenager. My hybrid identity and my social position returning home as an artist, a researcher, a former resident, a foreigner, between an outsider and an insider complicates the way in which the photographs presented are read. The images also take on different meanings depending on the context in which they are shown. When an installation of this work was shown in Bolivia, the audience identified with the people and the places in the photographs. This body of work became a portrayal of “home” for the viewers. Upon return to Canada, I must contextualize the place where the photographs were taken as well as the people in the portraits in relation to my own personal narrative, which informs a larger social context of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
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