송지은 : 나는 몰라…뭐가 답답한지 모르겠어…근데 나도 계속 설명하는데 내 말을 못알아 들으니까, 답답해. 

Q레이터 : 응…어… 이게 참…

Jee Song: I don’t know… I don’t know what feels frustrating… but I keep explaining, and you still can’t understand what I’m saying, so I feel frustrated.

Qrator: Yeah… uh… this is really…

라움콘 《울림만 있다면》 2023, 사운드 퍼포먼스, 30분

laumkon 《If Only There is  Resonance》 2023,    Performance, 30mins  

라움콘 《울림만 있다면》 2024, 사운드 퍼포먼스, 18분

laumkon 《If Only There is  Resonance》 2024, Performance, 18mins 

If Only There is Resonance, laumkon

laumkon Qrator, who developed aphasia following a hemorrhage in the left temporal lobe, finds that spoken language sounds unintelligible to him, as if it were a blend of murmuring or buzzing noises. This condition, where spoken language is perceived more as sound, is known as sensory aphasia, or Wernicke's aphasia. Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia often experience difficulty understanding what others are saying, compared to speaking or reading and may sometimes create their own neologisms, like "Laumkon" for "brushing teeth." Such language disruptions have led to a shrinking of his everyday world. Much like a paralyzed limb, language hinders his social connections, with society more often isolating rather than accommodating his slower pace of language comprehension. Consequently, the agency and authority of speech are naturally transferred to others, and due to a complex blend of absence, discomfort, and impossibility, he requires interpretations and translations of speech in communication. In a conversation where he’s displaced, speaking in neologisms that no one understands, and at times drawing either attention or neglect due to the incomprehensibility, how might he find ways to voice “his own share” of expression?

Qrator described the foreign nature of the sounds he hears to Jee Song, who mimicked these sounds back to him, repeatedly trying to recreate them with mouth sounds. Together, they imagined abstract forms of language sounds in environments filled with noise, spaces with overlapping voices, and the fragmented form of speech that intermittently breaks. They came to think that these clustered words transformed into reverberations as their meaning was lost and collided with other untransmitted sounds, creating a humming effect. In a workshop with a composer, they explored ways to express the sounds heard as music, recording these resonant sounds as diverse score drawings. This process was like learning a new language and also felt like an attempt to convey untranslatable language through art, translating incomprehensible language into sound. 《If Only There is  Resonance》(2023) was a 30-minute performance held in a cultural space at the former oil reserve tanks in Sangam-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, created with Qrator, a percussionist, a pianist, performers, and a composer, producing varied reverberations based on various score drawings. We selected a circular, concrete column space with an open ceiling where sounds could freely resonate outward. In this space, a black grand piano, a brown carpet with mirrors, tambourines, whistles, bells, a plastic container filled with water, and other percussion instruments were arranged, along with a loop station set up on a table to record and play sounds. At the center of the space stood Qrator and the performers drawing text in chinese ink on Korean paper. The 5 performers wore headset mics and began by layering sounds in response to Qrator’s deep exhalation of “ah,” creating a build-up of resonance that spread to external speakers outside the circular space. In the first section, vocal resonances of the 5 performers transitioned to piano music, and in the second section, each instrument engaged in an exchange of sound. Qrator, using his cane, created spontaneous sounds by striking or scraping drainage pipes and grates, and the pianist threw small stones to piano strings and struck the piano body and the strings with percussion sticks to create resonant sounds. The percussionist added rhythmic interplay with finger splashes in water and struck the metallic parts of round mirrors with mallets, and added more rhythm with a whistle and exotic percussion sounds for more variations. The composer used the loop station to play recorded sounds, adding depth to the sonic landscape. While 《If Only There is  Resonance》(2023) was a performance that used the experience of resonance to express music with musicians based on a composition workshop, 《If Only There is  Resonance》(2024) was an exhibition composed of score drawings, text drawings, symbol drawings of resonance-blended conversations of daily life from 2023 to 2024, and instruments to resonance created from diverse objects. Here, all the components were connected through movement to express diverse sounds in the form of resonance. Starting with drawings that depict the transformed, resonant forms of language as symbols, 《If Only There is  Resonance》 unfolds through a series of 16 drawings, each illustrating the process, ideas, and text of the project as well as abstract representations of language as musical scores. These drawings are displayed side by side on the gallery walls. Additionally, 5 symbolized drawings, capturing the resonant sounds embedded in everyday conversations, are printed on white adhesive sheets and installed on the gallery floor. The 12 cane instruments, inspired by Qrator’s walking cane that aids his unsteady steps, were crafted with elements like quad canes, chair canes, and single-legged canes, combined with livestock bells, bear bells, ornamental bells, finger bells, cowbells, cymbal, sizzler chains, tambourines, speaker stands, table bells, microphones, wire scrubbers, and clothes hangers. Alongside these, a music stand with a score drawing and around 100 orange bells connected in rings, 4 laundry drying racks with bells, a police light stand, an outfit made from white fabric and silver bells that rings when moved, and a mirror-like stainless steel panel are installed throughout the exhibition space. The performance conducted with musicians, a cellist, a dancer, and a visual artist begins with Qrator guiding the performers to create a space resonant with sounds through their interaction with the objects. Qrator slowly walks toward the music stand and signals the performers, who then contribute their sounds to the performance. The dancer makes an entrance by dragging the thunder instrument along the floor, while the cellist walks in to begin playing the cello lying on the floor. The musician joins by plucking the bass guitar to blend with the sounds made by the dancer and the cellist. The visual artist, laumkon, and Song each add to the atmosphere by shaking thunder instruments and wearing outfits adorned with bells. Throughout the space, the objects respond with resonant sounds to the performers' movements — walking, running, throwing, rubbing, plucking, striking, dragging, and bumping. These resonances combine with the sounds of the bass guitar, singing bowls, thunder instrument, and cello, not through direct play but through each instrument’s inherent resonance. The performers repeat cycles of following Qrator's directions and returning to their own movements, creating varying resonances: intense, subtle, fast, and slow. The 20-minute performance gradually comes to a close as Qrator signals a stop, and as each sound fades, the space returns to silence.

《If Only There is  Resonance》, which begins with the experience of a foreignised native language, proposes “listening together” to different forms of language. It invites others to expand the world where language has transformed into resonance, offering a more diverse array of sounds. We imagine that at the moment when our limited experiences of language are translated and expressed as resonance, the barriers that language has created between the other and myself dissolve, allowing us to connect through the shared experience of sound.

* Wernicke's aphasia is a type of aphasia that occurs due to damage to Wernicke's area, located near the temporal lobe and occipital lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain. It is also known as "sensory aphasia."