PETROGENESIS, PETRA GENETRIX by Ayoung Kim

2019 | Single Channel Video | 7'

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea

In 2019, Ayoung Kim travelled to Mongolia to research its abundant animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones and sacred caves that purify human guilts. It is the widespread belief of the Mongolian people that rocks and minerals are alive, like other natural elements. Consider the particular origin myth that human beings were born from rocks. From where does the belief come from, and why has it prevailed for so long…?

Ayoung Kim traces this topic and creates her own hyperbolic mythology connected to the origin of Petra Genetrix by integrating interviews with a historian, geologist, geology museum director, and the locals. By way of the notion of Petrogenesis – which refers to a genesis from rocks – Ayoung Kim wanders the interrelated and overlapped layers of time, as though lost in the Earth’s strata.

“Quartz can be considered to be a type of natural computer, since it absorbs and stores a large amount of energy.” Can we think of the rocks and stones that have existed since the beginning of the Earth as the Earth’s vehicle for memory storage? 

땅에 대한 심원한 믿음이 지속되어 온 것으로 알려진 몽골로 조사여행을 떠난 작가는, 몽골의 대지 어머니 신앙, 어머니바위 신앙, 돌과 바위가 살아 있다는 믿음, 인류가 공유하는 바위에서 태어난 인간에 대한 신화를 더듬어 간다. 이러한 믿음은 왜 지구 곳곳에서 이토록 오랫동안 지속되어 온 것일까?

현재 진행형인 이 프로젝트는 역사학자, 지질학자, 지질학 박물관장, 일반인들과의 인터뷰를 조합하여 페트라 제네트릭스의 기원과 맞닿는 또 다른 신화를 만들어 나간다.

“석영은 일종의 자연산 컴퓨터로 간주될 수 있습니다. 많은 에너지를 빨아들이고 저장하기 때문이지요.”
지구의 탄생과 함께 존재해 온 돌과 바위는 어쩌면 지구의 기억을 저장하는 메모리와도 같은 것이었을까?