Ghost Body Workshop 3
(Santa Cruz, 2026 — under Downloading Ghosts)

Ghost Body Workshop 3 was held beneath Downloading Ghosts: Hauntology of Taxidermy, extending the installation into a participatory space of reflection and collective inquiry. Within the field of suspended paper bodies—each reconstructed from extracted scientific data of taxidermied birds—the workshop traced a parallel narrative: the haenyeo of Jeju Island, whose DNA and physiological data now circulate across global biological research institutions.

By placing these two conditions side by side—the bird translated into data and re-materialized as paper, and the haenyeobody continuously sampled and distributed as biological information—the workshop asked how scientific knowledge is produced through processes of extraction, abstraction, and circulation. Participants reflected on the immense social capital invested in “science” as a dominant mode of knowledge production, while questioning whether the knowledge most urgently needed might instead be that of survival—embodied, experiential, and collectively transmitted.

Drawing from the haenyeo practice of transmitting life-sustaining knowledge through gime and ritual, the workshop opened a discussion on how questions of life and death might be brought back into the heart of scientific inquiry. As participants crafted their own gime, they engaged in a collective conversation: what forms of knowledge do we need to sustain life, and how might we produce and share them differently?

Ghost Body Workshop 2
(El Hacedor Residency, Spain, 2025)

Ghost Body Workshop 2 explored the conditions under which beings are rendered “killable,” monstrous, or disposable within human–nature relations. Conducted virtually by Chaelim in the El Hacedor Gallery,Spain, the workshop brought together participants to reflect on how certain lives are framed as threats, resources, or expendable entities.

Through the making of gime, participants were invited to reimagine these categorizations: what is feared, what is excluded, and how narratives shape our relationships with nonhuman worlds. The workshop questioned how dominant imaginaries of nature—often grounded in control, management, and extraction—produce hierarchies of life and death, and how alternative forms of relation might be constructed through speculative, embodied practices.

Ghost Body Workshop 1
(UCSC, Santa Cruz, 2024)

The first Ghost Body Workshop was held beside a koi pond at UC Santa Cruz on Halloween, 2024, beginning with a simple question: “Have you heard of the squid ghost?” From this starting point, the workshop focused on what does notbecome a ghost—those beings, events, and conditions that are never narrated, remembered, or even imagined.

Participants created gime—temporary paper bodies used in Jeju shamanic practice to host spirits—as a way to summon ghosts that had never been seen or spoken of. Through this process, the workshop examined how the category of the “killable” is constructed: those whose deaths do not generate stories, mourning, or memory.

As the workshop concluded, participants were asked to describe the ghosts they had created and the powers they held. One participant imagined a redwood tree ghost capable of holding memory across time and perceiving possible futures. Through these reflections, the workshop proposed that ghosts—whether present, absent, or unrecognized—carry forces related to memory, time, and futurity.

The gime, as a material host for these ghosts, functions not only as a ritual object but as a speculative tool: a way of creating conditions for communication, relation, and the imagining of alternative futures. In this sense, the workshop frames art as a space for living with unresolved histories and ongoing entanglements, extending beyond representation into collective, material practice.