Yoojin Lee (UK/KR)

I work across and in-between performance, sound, text, installation and video to embody ways of becoming and knowing through care, resistance, and multiple temporalities. My work engages with conditions of (in)activity and (un)productivity; particularly by thinking/feeling through sleep, sloth, and slowness. How can sleep and a sleeping body become a site of quiet resistance? How can slow, symbiotic tenderness disrupt the timescape of linear and constant output? I sleep in London.

During my residency, I will be continuing and developing my research on fall(ing), light/darkness, verticality/horizontality, activity/inactivity, visibility/invisibility, intensities of slowness, mutual support, tender vigilance and safe surfaces. Through collaborative experimentation, I will ask: What does a sleeping/sleepy body-being become against the backdrop of a world that is lit 24 hours? What does this state of repose mean when there is no time to pause? What lullaby can we sing (for one another)? How can we fall asleep (together)? How do we fall (together)?

In a few words, explain what drew you to this project.

My wish to explore sleep as a way of knowing together, a way of being together, a way of becoming together.

Q & A

Can you sleep "anywhere anytime" or do you need the comfort of your own bed to sleep well?

Almost anywhere anytime. I wonder if having moved houses a lot during my childhood has something to do with it.

Do you enjoy taking naps? Why?

Yes. There’s something assuring and affirming about them. To acknowledge these small sleeps, small rests, small withdrawals, small surrenders as part of my being in the world and being with the world.

What is the strangest place you have ever fallen asleep?

An empty plot of land in one of the busiest part of London. It was fenced off and was probably waiting for some kind of planning permission. Sometimes ambulances were parked inside. A building has replaced the empty site since then.

Do you tend to remember your dreams?

Not always, but when I do I remember them quite vividly. The colours, sounds, textures, temperatures. The atmospheres, the emotions. But perhaps less of smells and tastes.