We Relate, Therefore We Are: Relation-Making in Jin-me Yoon’s Practice
Our bus drove us through the active construction site for the Southwest Calgary Ring Road before it pulled into the remains of a movie set simulating a bombed Belgian city. The set is located on a former military training site, which the Department of National Defence leased from the Tsuut’ina First Nation for military training from 1901 to 1996.1 Part of this land was used for the production of the film Passchendaele (2008), about a white Canadian soldier in World War I. While the rest of the 380-acre plot is still embedded with unexploded landmines left behind by the military, this small section was cleaned up for the film shoot. The ruins lured me in, and I could see the exposed core material of these buildings—weathered Styrofoam—underneath the dilapidated layers of paint and decoration. Fake rubble was strewn about the site amid the real rubble left behind by military training; from afar, their origins were indistinguishable. Here, the residues of cultural and military production collapsed into each another.
We were here to participate in a film shoot for artist Jin-me Yoon’s new body of work, which has been in the making for two years in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 Territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Stoney Nakoda and Tsuut’ina First Nation. Jin-me is a Korean-born, Vancouver-based artist working and living on the unceded and occupied territories of the
