Park Jiha and Roy Claire Potter in conversation — ‘Emotion in the commons’

South Korean musician Park Jiha joined English artist and writer Roy Claire Potter for an improvised collaboration for Counterflows 2022.

They were initially brought together by BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction in 2020, where they met in Maida Vale for the first time. Despite the language barrier the combination worked seamlessly, with Roy editing together fragments of their writing on the fly to respond to the tone of Jiha’s traditional Korean instruments and Jiha improvising around the emotional resonance of Roy’s voice.

This time round they reunited on stage at Glasgow’s community central halls for the opening night of Counterflows 2022 and focused their collaboration around a series of photos which Jiha had sent Roy in advance. The photos were snapshots of Jiha’s everyday life in Korea: a cake she had baked; cat paws poking under a door; an eroded shell. Roy used these cues as the jump off point for their texts but without knowing anything about their context.

In this podcast episode, Jiha comes together with Roy for a rare conversation in translation, to talk directly to each other’s work in a way they generally avoid doing in advance. Jiha reveals the story behind the images she chose, Roy discusses how she interpreted them and the conversation is interwoven with a recording of their opening night performance at Counterflows.