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NATHALIE DAOUST'S KOREAN DREAMS
BY SAMANTHA SMALL
NATHALIE DAOUST’S photographs reflect a love for eclectic places and a wild, inexhaustible sense of curiosity. Exploring, experiencing, and documenting rarely visited landscapes and carefully hidden places, she has spent the last decade producing voyeuristic insights into otherwise veiled existences.
THREE GENERATIONS OF PUNISHMENT North Korean law specifies “three generations of punishment.” If you commit a crime, your children and grandchildren will also receive the full brunt of the punishment, which often involves a lifetime in prison. Children born in prison are raised as prisoners because their “blood is guilty.” Instituted in 1950, this law was supposed to eliminate the blood lineage of counterrevolutionary North Koreans after the war.
Nathalie studied the technical aspects of photography at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal. Since, she has been travelling the globe seeking to translate her experiences into photography-based artworks. She spent two years experimenting and living in the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York, which led her further abroad to explore Tokyo’s red light district, Brazilian brothels, and Swiss naturists in the Alps.
Nathalie says,
Nathalie’s latest project, Korean Dreams (2016) is a complex series of 25, 50 × 70 cm prints that reflect the mysterious world of North Korea.
Nathalie’s images captured in North Korea reveal a country that seems to exist outside of time, as a carefully choreographed mirage. She has spent much of her career exploring the idea of fantasy: the hidden desires and urges that compel people to dream, to dress up, to move beyond the bounds of convention. With Korean Dreams, she is exploring this escapist impulse not as an individual choice, but as a way of life forced upon an entire nation.
HIGHER EDUCATION Kim Il Sung University, founded in October 1946, is the country’s only comprehensive higher education institu- tion offering bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. The university plays an important role in preparing the ruling elite for positions in the party and government. Students have access to a research room with Internet access but websites are monitored and restricted, while all books and material are pre-approved by the government.
Most foreigners associate North Korea, shrouded by fanatical isolationism, only with the hallmarks of its repressive regime – kidnapping, torture, and forced labour camps. Tourist experiences are carefully crafted to countermand these impressions. Accompanied by guides at all times, and adhering to the rigid, pre-approved travel program, visitors get a highly selective view of the country as they are paraded past cultural landmarks such as theatres, schools, and music halls, meant to create the illusion of a perfect society.
The difficulty of reconciling systemic violence and repression with this shiny world led Nathalie to focus on the spaces that exist on the edge of the “tourist zone.” By shooting furtively while travelling between destinations, she was able to capture an alternative narrative. Guided by the notion that North Koreans are residing in a “dream-state,” where truth is not lived but imposed by those in power, her anonymous forms wander through the landscape. From civilians bicycling against an urban backdrop, to military personnel marching stridently in line and schoolchildren staring pensively out of the frame, these figures seem to exist suspended in an ambiguous, timeless dimension. Playing with the line between fiction and reality, Nathalie exposes an indeterminate space where “truth” and “lies” are interchangeable.
She says, “The aesthetic of my new project continues this visual exploration at the border between dream and reality, yet this time it embraces escapism of a country and the act of losing oneself within it.”
The breakdown of the original negative film has produced final images that appear indistinct and somewhat ghostlike. As the layers of distance from the original film are removed, a sense of detachment between the photographer and her subjects is revealed. Nathalie’s darkroom method also mimics the way information is transferred in North Korea: it is stifled until the truth is lost in the process. The resultant images speak to North Korean society, of missing information and truth concealed. HEALTH CARE In 1947, free healthcare was introduced for all citizens in North Korea, but the system collapsed in the late eighties. Many hospitals operate without electricity or heat and all patients have to buy their own medicines. While visit- ing a hospital Nathalie’s group was told that no disabled children have been born in North Korea since the 1950s because of the strong genes of the Korean people. On the con- trary, a North Korean doctor who defected, Ri Kwang-chol, has claimed that babies born with physical defects are rapidly put to death and buried.
Nathalie’s multi-step development process is integral in this series to the interplay between fiction and reality. In the darkroom she reconstructs a forgotten past and an unknown present. The images were taken on 35mm black and white film and have been obscured in her unique photographic process. She creates a “negative” by cutting out her selected frame from its contact sheet and peeling off the back of the photo paper.
BICYCLES The late Kim Jong II reportedly felt that the sight of a woman on a bike was potentially damaging to public morality. In the mid-nineties, after the daughter of a top general was killed on a bike, the law periodi- cally banned women from riding bicycles. Women are also generally restricted from holding driving licenses.
SCHOOLING EDUCATION is universal and state-funded. According to the CIA, North Korea has a 100 % literacy rate and students have to complete a three-year, 81-hour course on Kim Jong-un. In the 1990s, all teachers were required to pass an accordion test before being able to receive their teaching certificate.
