Sinking under the dark sea

Slought is pleased to announce "Sinking under the dark sea," an online project about the Sewol Ferry Disaster (2014) and the contestation of memory in South Korea. The Sewol sank beneath the Yellow Sea in April 2014, killing 304 passengers including 261 high school students on their way to a field trip. A year after the tragedy, four designers and 59 illustrators of children's books came together in collaboration and published the Yellow Book, a graphic novel that documents the disaster and its aftermath. This online project, which has been organized in the months leading up to the third anniversary of the disaster, features a new English-language translation of this publication. In so doing, Slought seeks to support the collective by introducing their work to new audiences and contribute to ongoing efforts of remembrance and memorialization.

Since the events of April 2014, public understanding of the Sewol disaster in Korea has emerged at the intersection of two discrete sets of memories—the "official" and the "vernacular." According to the historian John Bodnar, official memory is often shaped by governmental and corporate elites "for the purpose of stabilization of the status quo" and in order "to foster patriotism and civic duty." In the case of the Sewol, the government has sought to influence both the memory and understanding of the disaster with the help of mainstream media. Unsupported and at times even fabricated aspects of the disaster have circulated which downplay the scale of the calamity and conceal the government's incompetence in handling the crisis. In this "official" reconstruction of the truth, the victims of the Sewol register as anonymous statistics, as numbers of lives lost.

In so doing, the victims are dematerialized and disembodied, at once inhibiting individual empathy and producing, on a societal level, a general affect of apathy. This approach, which resembles the Government's earlier response to the Jeju Massacre (1948-54) and the Gwangju Democratization Movement (1980), has enabled the government to define the Sewol as a surmountable tragedy and to urge the nation to move on, thus interrupting the process of mourning altogether. This tendency can be contrasted with vernacular responses to the Sewol disaster, in which the victims are remembered as discrete individuals whose traumatic loss has caused untold pain and mourning. Here the victims are represented not as anonymous figures but rather as daughters, sons, parents, and friends. The ethical imperative to mourn and to remember thus takes precedence over the government's admonishment to come to terms with the disaster.

Three years later, the Korean public remains divided on basic questions concerning what happened during the disaster, how the disaster should be remembered, and the importance of governmental transparency. What happens to the memory of the Sewol in this landscape of distrust, when testimony itself is contested? How has this struggle over who controls the memory of the disaster affected individual processes of mourning? How can art help us contest this instrumentalization of loss? "Sinking under the dark sea" seeks to respond to these questions and make legible this contestation of memories, with the hope that this project comforts those in mourning and supports greater understanding of the disaster within South Korea and abroad.