NOKDU Bookstore for the Living and the Dead

Abstract

There are places that function as a knot, a knot where an infinite number of events, history flows, narrative lines, life stories, ideas, desires, sorrows, positions, memories, longings, collide; collide as in a knot. They all crystallize in a relatively small, unimportant place. Borges called this The Aleph. NOKDU bookstore, re-constructed and re-baptized for the GB 2016 as NOKDU bookstore for the living and the dead, was such a place. A modest bookstore where the Gwangju Uprising 5.18 (1980) was incubated and hatched, where Yoon Sang-won attended a 1976 speech given by poet Kim Nam-ju discussing the Paris Commune, where women got organized and self-managed to respond to violence and misinformation, where news were distributed, where corpses where shrouded and mourned, and where books were sold, discussed, and read. Every bookstore is a sort of Aleph, a condensed archive of men and women's lives. It is from this position where we set the NOKDU bookstores for the living and the dead in 2016, at the Gwangju Biennale, in collaboration with The Book Society.