Refrain

The title Refrain is quoted from One Thousand Plateaus, co-authored by Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the Refrain plateaus, they call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes. So we have refrains of motion, posture, vision, etc. Yet strictly speaking, only when it refers to sonic or sound territory, or being governed by sound, can we indeed talk about a piece of refrain. This is also its origin. Ritornello with the meaning of prelude or refrain already existed during the Renaissance to describe madrigal as a recurring phrase, which was subsumed under the opera notation in the 17th. Although refrain constantly evolves in the history of music, and is applied widely in philosophy, cosmology, ethology and mathematics, its essence did not deviate from the repeated phrase.

However, refrain is not a mechanical repeat, but rather a repetition harbouring difference and departing from functionality towards the expressive. With clear and blurring boundary, the territory is alway open to the new possibility just as a phrase waiting for its variation. In Florian’s project of Hanguk, the recurring element is his connection with Korea. He was adopted by a Germany family in the second year after his birth and returned to Korea with thirty years passing. The unexpected strangeness, hesitation and uncertainty appeared and overwhelmed him. He resorted to photography — the most familiar routine as his approach towards that alienation — and marked a territory of his own. In the following projects, Florian started to seek for the sense beyond his territory, waiting at intersections, quoting retired men in a historian park, which activated the deterritorialization and reterritorialization. It is a passage of self-identification, a recurring refrain. Yet as what Florian states, “I don’t look at that which separates me from the world of my previous experience. What I found in Korea is much more a sense of the alien and yet strangely familiar.” These indistinct connections partition and also extend the refrain. Nevertheless, space-time is not a maze overwhelming the self, but rather replete with tunnels. Self exploration is no less than guerrilla soldiers traversing inside the maze, even a whisper can denotate, anytime.