When the planet was secure, human beings drew lines in the earth and made territory, assembling groups to occupy it. States, nations, and governments were based in particular places. However, amid the ruins of modernism, as revealed by climate disasters and epidemics, the boundary between politics and administration is steadily blurring, and the planet and the ground itself are becoming more important. Furthermore, the number of climate nomads moving in search of places to live is increasing. A negligible Earth taken for the backdrop of the human community is disappearing. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, now that the climate crisis has led the ground and nature, rather than human beings, to grab hold of history and take it in a different direction, the Earth is not a backdrop of human society that stands by silently. The Earth is the subject and no longer the object. 

Within the context of the dwindling of the sense of belonging once given by boundaries in the ground, how are we to find the identity of a community? How can humans, disconnected from places, create communities? We took this question as a starting point. How can we form groups and “land” on an Earth where territorial boundaries have been erased? 

Gunsan: A Laboratory for Population “Landing” 

In the small midwestern coastal city of Gunsan in South Korea, various methods of settling have been tried. As stated in the local magazine Gunsan (vol. 2), “coming and going is the way this place Gunsan has lived.” Strangers have been constantly coming and establishing relationships with the region. People who come and go have cultivated a legacy of local culture here rather than those who were born and raised in Gunsan. Gunsan is a city of a “percentage population.”

Its beginnings can be traced back to the Japanese occupation, when a port was built to exploit grain from the peninsula and secure land to settle Japanese people. People came from all over the country to enjoy the benefits of the colonial economy. Even after liberation, urban structure for exploitation continued to play a central role in the city’s old town. After the Cold War, the USFK built an air base and was stationed there, and U.S. military culture, such as whiskey, spread to Gunsan. 

Recently, Udangtangtang, a young group of newcomers, has been attempting to establish relationships with the region through “Do It Together” (DIT) workshops. By revitalizing the old market, hosting local culture-based guerrilla events in the context of tactical urbanism, and converting abandoned empty spaces into urban shelters, Udangtangtang has been forming a loosely knit community through making and direct action. Rather than busying itself with occupying places, it carefully set foot in Gunsan by devising a “method” for connecting to the region. Given that putting down roots is not its ultimate goal, the actions of Udangtangtang are closer to “landing.” Efforts to scheme and plot a way to land in the region was essential to “assembling a group while making something that the region needs.” Udangtangtang’s methods are innovative in that they design communities-to-be. Here we see the possibility of creating a community for a climate nomad century. 

What will happen if this legacy of Gunsan’s scheming and plotting, which converged upon a region through direct action, continues into 2086? Working together with Udangtangtang, we experimented with a new method of the DIT workshop for the Biennale. 

Low-Density Design 

The world population is expected to keep increasing until 2086, but South Korea’s population is already plummeting as of 2022. 

The population decline in Gunsan is also noticeable. In 2022, Gunsan was one of the cities with the highest percentages of empty houses in Korea. While some residents leave, the spaces they leave behind remain untouched in the urban landscape. Countless vacant houses respond to a population that has forlornly fled. Attempts to fill these gaps with urban regeneration will end up with the same result as a game of musical chairs. While each of region attempts to regenerate, the population that can be drawn from is limited, and even that limited group is decreasing. 

It is time to accept population decline rather than finding ways to prevent it. Rather, it is necessary to devise a method in which “extinction” unfolds in a proactive manner. We need active measures that go beyond a region’s ability to “age well” to ensure that the region “dies well.” However, because of population decline, regional boundaries and administration are becoming weaker and less capable of carrying that out. Comprehensive maintenance to maintain appropriate density is beyond the capacity of local governments’ finances. It is difficult for the structure and policies of local governments to handle the decline of the regions under their jurisdiction. This is because reconciling the difference between a low-density population and a high-density built environment is also an act of unbolting administrative boundaries. 

A DIT workshop was held to figure out how to convert Gunsan into a low-density city. We considered whether there was a way to adequately dismantle the preexisting artificial environment and attempted small direct actions. By dismantling countless built environments that were left behind and emptied with no means of revival, we tried to modify the abandoned landscape into vivid scenery. 

Joseph A. Schumpeter used the word “creative destruction” in praising the growth of capitalist innovation. In comparison, the work of this DIT workshop was “destructive creation.” Designing extinction contrasts with capitalist innovation, which drives growth in that its design shifts from production to distribution. Those standing shoulder to shoulder at the 2086 Future Community DIT Workshop in Gunsan went beyond people to include nature. 

Let’s take a look at a photograph of an empty house in Gunsan for a moment. The inside of the house is shabby and faded, but the nature outside the window is green and vivid. Even if you just open the window, it appears as if the tree will come inside. Nature easily permeates the places of human beings, even through small gaps. If only the roof or part of the walls that block the external environment were torn down, the building would begin to break down as soon as it was hit with gusts of rain. At the DIT workshop in Gunsan, the activity of removing the roof made a path for the force of weathering to enter. It was a small attempt to intervene in the activity of nature’s dismantling. 

Over time, the artificial walls and floors will weather away, and plants and animals will begin to live in the former space of the house. Gradually, the human residence will be replaced by a natural habitat. When this occurs, nature is the subject, not the object. It disintegrates, replaces, and generates. Past social practices surrounding the land, namely ownership, commodification, control, and domination, are interrupted. The ground is not just land, but a driving force in developing life and the intrinsic capacity of the Earth. 

Scheming and Plotting and Direct Action 

There is another subject here besides people and nature: the “tool.” The DIT Workshop devised a tool to tear down roofs. To find a suitable tool for making cracks in the abandoned structure and letting nature in, we inquired about what kind of intervention to the Earth the direct action of using this tool would lead to in the future. 

Working with the premise that accelerating climate disasters will make it difficult to use electricity, we designed a tool rather than a machine that uses electric power. However, the strength of a single person is not enough to make cracks in artificial structures such as roofs, walls, and floors. A tool that requires the strength of more than two people to work properly was devised. This changed the meaning of the English expression of “lending a hand” from a vague act of helping to a direct and physical act. 

Making and then using tools together naturally became a process of embodying cooperative work. Through the design and use of tools, our bodies were enlarged through the hands and feet of the community. The tool-making workshop was a process of thinking. We discussed which parts of Gunsan needed to be emptied out in order to reorganize it into a landscape of adequate density, imagined the use of necessary tools according to the physical properties of the structure to be destroyed, and fumbled about as we came up with the principles behind a tool that would operate on the basis of the strength of several people. 

Above all, through the process of talking about what needs will arise for us in the future of climate disasters, we posited the direction of community building. As we devised the tool, we looked in a matter-of-fact way at the situation we were in and learned about ourselves. In other words, through the 29 activities of this scheming and plotting, in which several people’s hands and heads acted as one, the terms of the community were also created. 

Before the appearance of machines in industrial society, tools were objects that defined the way people and nature were mediated, so much so that periods in human history were divided by the way tools were made. With the advent of industrial society, humans used and produced machines without knowing the principles of their functioning. In terms of awakening to principles connected to an object, designing a tool goes beyond the realm of practicality to that of the ontological. A tool is a type of nonhuman actor. 

It is worth noting the words of anthropologist Arturo Escobar: “Ontologically oriented design.... promotes convivial and communal instrumentations involving human/nonhuman collectives provoked into existence by ecological breakdowns or shared experiences of harm.” The process of making/creating affects the people doing the making and the environment at the same time. According to Escobar, design can be a way for communities to move towards autonomy and transformation. 

Community as a Process of Entering into the World 

The DIT workshop in Gunsan was a process of making/creating a community through cooperative work. Cooperative work for the sake of taking a step forward as a community is learned through practice, not an ethical resolution. Sociality is rooted not in actions or labor but the power of the work. Like any other tribe that thought about and made tools to acquire certain desired objects of nature or to modify and transform the condition of the object, we learned a different way of “doing together” through the extinction design DIT workshop. 

Now, the question at the beginning of the text, “ How can humans, disconnected from places, create communities?” appears to be in need of correction, that is, to “How is a community formed as a process of entering into the world?” The way to develop the capacity of life and the Earth needs to soon become the way for humans to assemble groups. It is time to design a community that moves toward an ontological promise, practice, narrative, and action that is different from the unsustainable and post-futuristic practices of modernity. 

Translated by Alice Kim, Proofreading by Cassidy Sulaiman