The old Seoul Station as a performative space: undoing the archive in the city

Abstract

ABSTRACT The old Seoul Station was established in 1925 as part of the Japanese effort to expand into Manchuria through the Korean Peninsula. The colonial-era edifice (then called Gyeongseong Station) served as a major gateway for this ambition. During South Korea’s rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, the station became a major entry point for a massive rural population who migrated to the capital city to realize their “Seoul dream.” The building ceased to be used as a train station in 2004 and fell into some disrepair, but was restored in 2011 as a multi-genre cultural site, Culture Station 284 [Munhwayok 284]. A variety of exhibitions, performances, workshops, and talks are still held there. The old Seoul Station both symbolized and enabled mobility, migration, modernization, and urbanization; today, its space operates amidst complex layers of time and history, at the center of conflicting desires. Culture Station 284 remains a symbol of colonial exploitations and expansions and also provides a real artistic and intellectual portal into the world of today. In this article, I examine how this historic architecture departs from and complicates the notion of an archive. Regarding the building as a performative, fluid space allows it to be reiterated, reborn, and regenerated into various strands of narrative and also allows it agency within the processes of structuring and transmitting disparate forms of identities and desires. I argue that such a performative reading allows us to view the architectural space as always moving between past and present, fiction and reality.