Nevertheless, unfinished loss keeps resounding—unarchived, unvoiced, and ungrieved , 2026 -
Diagrammic score-script in mixed media
Dimensions variable
Sound duration: 17-minute, loop

Installation view from the duo exhibition on the horizon of loss, NEJD, 2026. Photo by Jost Dolinšek.

Installation view, NEJD, 2026. Photo by Jost Dolinšek.

As they enter the space, the audience encounters sambe-suui gilssam—a collective practice of spinning and weaving hemp shrouds in Korea that is entangled with a colonial history. Lived conditions, oral lore, and labour songs move through bodies, yet they do not resolve neatly into either resistance or compliance.

The score script installation situates the audience within a site where tensions surface: between material dispossession and cosmological rhythms; between archival record and oral transmission; and between gendered obligation and other, less nameable forms of recurrence.

Artist's contextual note: Historical accounts often locate a decisive rupture in 1934, when Japanese colonial authorities prohibited the use of silk in Korean funerary rites and enforced hemp as shroud material. Redirecting silk toward wartime economic use, this policy disrupted established mourning practices and altered the ethical conditions through which honour and ritual continuity had long been sustained. As part of a broader colonial modernisation project, such regulation reshaped cultural life through material intervention. What remains less legible in the archive, however, is how this rupture was lived, negotiated, and transmitted. Rhythm, bodily labour, and oral repetition persisted beyond official record, leaving silence where embodied knowledge might otherwise appear.

The italicised passages in the score script are utterances from sambe-suui gilssam practitioners. The longer passage is a weavers’ labour song, passed down across generations; the last passage is oral lore circulating among labourers while also exceeding the weavers themselves. In my first encounter with sambe-suui gilssam practitioners residing in Andong, Korea, I listened as Kim Sin-ja described how traditionally woven sambe was made using materials drawn from the surrounding environment—including saliva—and the bodily labour involved. Wrapping the deceased in such sambe-suui was understood as enabling a return to "where we came from" earth—soil, in an unencumbered state. I rendered the term here as “Nature,” following this account (of return through a plant, soil and the bodily labour), treating it not as a fixed or abstract category but as a site where such material practices gather and where unfinished loss persists rhythmically.

Today, sambe-suui is increasingly framed as a colonial legacy, treated as a residue to be rectified. Capitalist logics of efficiency, industrialisation, and generational shifts have further distanced the practice from everyday social life, while renewed calls to “return” to silk cast restoration as a solution—flattening loss into repair and difference into homogeneity.

Challenging such logic, the work turns instead toward what neither restoration nor correction can hold: the gestures, repetitions, and sonic–material transmissions through which loss continues to echo without closure.

To romanticise these transmissions would risk reproducing violence, erasure, and distortion. It is precisely at this impasse that Nevertheless, unfinished loss—rather than reconstructing history or documenting practice—steps away from dominant epistemic frameworks at the point where they begin to falter. It attends instead to what remains unknown: when and how such lore emerged, and whether—amid erasure and oppression—it may have functioned as a means of sustaining altered forms of continuity among the living and the dead. This uncertainty keeps the unresolved open to speculation.

The script operates as a performative score that rehearses “return” not as recovery, but as decay, relation, and endurance—a persistence with what refuses to settle.