Berlin

Pictures that capture the bronze statue in a shaped of a girl with an uneven bob haircut. There is an empty chair on the left side of the statue and also a panel that explains why the statue is there in Korean, English, and German. The street right in front of the statue is empty.

On October 1st, 2024, I visited the Statue of Peace in Berlin and the Comfort Women Museum. Both were in the district which was way less crowded than Hermannplatz where we stayed for the study abroad program. When I visited there, the organization, Korean Verband, was fighting against the city government of Berlin which moved the statue into a less populated area from the city central, Berlin Mitte. At the same time, they were having an interview with the Japanese conservative newspaper, and I still remember the exhaustion that they had in the room that day. Visiting this statue and having interviews with Korean activists in Germany motivated me to keep going with my project to record and archive the oral history about the memory about Comfort Women because of the legacy of this system, colonialism, imperialism, racism, heteropatriarchal sexism, etc.. is still present and repressing people, and people's survival and active resistance is what enables our survival possible in this world. I want a world without sexual violence, and recording this personal/collective history, I believe, gets us together to resist the system that enables sexual violence.