UNTITLED

Yangji-ri, a Minbuk village (a village to the north of the civilian control line), is a migrant community constructed under military control as a propaganda toward North Korea. The migrants of this village were given governmental support for housing, but their land ownership was not acknowledged. Their lives started in 100 small concrete houses built through a slipshod work, each household being granted two 29.75 square- meter houses. Now the village has become an unrealistic space like an empty stage painted by an axis of history, but more than 70 residents aged 80 and older still remain there, who have built their lives not on stage but on the land. For long they have extended and modified their 29.75 square-meter houses built on land they cannot own, creating unique house structures. These ‘add-on houses’ reflect the migrants’ narrative of displaced identities and represent the very space of their materialized selves.