artist profile: Jeesoo Hong
Jeesoo Hong is a Cologne-based artist working with sound and space. Her practice engages with existing environments as primary material, revealing their acoustics and spatial narratives.
Work shown: “Walls, Corners and Algae Blooms”
In this work, I focus on the aquatic animals’ gestures coming from the architectural elements that shape a rewilded swimming pool. This garden pool had been abandoned for years. Over time, mulberry bushes crept across its boundaries. Algae spread, the gathered rainwater turned hazy green, and the four-tiled wall-enclosed space became the habitat of backswimmers, water beetles, and aquatic salamanders. The algae are like liquid curtains drawn across the space, blurring the pool’s boundaries and creating privacy for its inhabitants. This project consists of 2–3 beam projections that show the life I filmed both inside and outside the pool. One of the rooms in Kulturhof Kalk, which was previously damp, will be filled with a green hue and an underwater soundscape recorded inside the pool. The sound composition includes the outside noises around the pool, such as neighbouring gardens, S-Bahn, airplanes, and children playing, all muffled by water.
