Jeamin Cha

Sleep Walker
Single channel video installation, 2009, HD video, 5minutes, color/sound

Sleep Walker is a video work consisting of two scenes: in one scene people are reciting lines from a children’s fiction Heidi (1881) by Swiss author Johanna Spyri, and in the second scene, a tap dancer is dancing and walking around the square outside of Garden 5, a newly built shopping complex in Songpa-gu, Seoul. The tap dancer, seen on the left screen, is dancing frantically, as if the magical shoes cast a spell on him. Sounds resonate loudly in the square — so much so that it is even hard to hear someone nearby — because the square is completely surrounded by buildings. In the video, passersby were cast on the spot to recite lines from Heidi, a story about a young girl who had to move to Frankfurt with her aunt but felt nostalgia for her home town in the Swiss Alps. Garden 5 is a giant shopping complex with residential spaces called “apartment-style factories.” The city of Seoul gave a priority in buying apartments to merchants who were running their businesses on the land where the Garden 5 was going to be built, when a major restoration project of Cheonggyecheon area in Songpa district was underway. However, the excessively high rent left the merchants who had agreed on the reconstruction feeling betrayed, because they couldn’t afford the new apartments. Those who cannot find their bed even in their fantasy became suspicious individuals like sleepwalkers. The fact that they can not reside in where they used to live or move to where they dream of living reminds us of Heidi who was unable to adapt to the heartless urban life and became a sleepwalker.

A Film by
Jeamin Cha

Cast
Tap dancer Sangbin Park
Reciter Yoonjung Jang, Yoorim Kim, Jungwon Yang, Juseok Kim

Director of Photography Dongseok Shin, Jeamin Cha
Sound Design In bloom’s studio

With Special Thanks to
Ikjung Cho, Meejung Kim