Rewriting the testimonies and records of middle-aged women who have spent more than three decades passing through patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality begins not by defining their experiences through a single identity or narrative, but by reconsidering the conditions, circumstances, and points of reflection from which their voices emerge. By bringing Adrienne Rich’s concepts of “lesbian existence” and the “lesbian continuum,” queer Korean history, Virginia Woolf’s letters, and related critical writings into dialogue with personal memories, I sought to explore how different eras and voices connect, intersect, and diverge.

I reconstructed these interviews and diverse references through acts of copying by hand, erasing, and tearing, refusing to seal memory into a completed narrative. The gap between what can be captured in words and writing and what ultimately remains inexplicable leads, through workshops with a performer, to the movement of “swimming.” The movements created by the participants’ bodies in the public square are not choreography intended to convey a predetermined meaning, but a bodily performance generated by emotions and memories that language cannot reach. Through this process, I sought to place personal records in parallel with and entangled within various forms of public history and historical events, while simultaneously resisting narratives that attempt to explain or resolve everything. I also seek to experiment with the possibility of struggle in which words, images, and bodies can coexist freely without being fixed or confined to a single meaning.​