Cosmo Drumming (MSC II), 2026
Video performance, 9 minutes, single-channel video
Cosmo Drumming uses the movement of drumming as a lens to examine how Korean ancestral healing practices have been transformed through colonialism, state power, and capitalism—and how these historical and ongoing shifts intersect with the politics of contemporary femininity. The video performance features the former massage worker Jongye alongside her two friends, Boksoon and Okja, who are part of a larger group of women that have been meeting every day except Sundays at 9 a.m. for decades on Gwanak Mountain in Seoul. There, they gather to exchange bodywork techniques alongside forms of folk medical knowledge. Gwanak Mountain, rocky and flame-shaped, is known for its hwa (fire) energy and constitutes one of the few remaining spaces for the practices of elderly women whose embodied knowledge remains unrecognized by institutional frameworks.
The work aims to archive the movement of drumming as a kinetic and choreographic knowledge that is re-articulated as a cosmotechnic of our erased female healing warriors. Through processes of epistemic violence and state simplification, their movement of drumming has been reclassified as superstition, stripped of authority, and transformed into standardized technical systems—a gendered shift that has disproportionately affected women in healing and care work. Cosmo Drumming is therefore a celebration of relational healing based on touch, sound, and movement. It yearns for what has been detached from its cosmological context and reorganized under medical, state, and capitalist regimes, where care is commodified and circulated as standardized services within the global wellness industries.
Direction: Yon Natalie Mik
Choreography: Kim Jongye, Yon Natalie Mik
Performers: Kim Jongye, Park Boksoon, Kim Okja
Camera: Jung Hye-jin
Camera assistant: Jo Mal
Editing: Jung Hye-jin, Yon Natalie Mik
Title Cards: Son Hyunkyung
Sound: Noh Eun-sil