: A Documentation of Artistic Practice from <Driver> to <All These Roads Just for You>
Yeong Ran Suh (2025). Published by Komma Production
‘All the roads are in love with Linda. Linda has decided to stay home.’
WHO IS LINDA?
“ On the dark stage, the ambient sound of a car driving on the road was heard. At one point, one performer with a trench coat walked backward from the aisle next to the stage. As soon as the performer appeared, she started talking about Linda without a second pause…The performer gave a more detailed storytelling about how Linda had a good relationship with the roads. Even when Linda went to work, only a 20-minute walk away, she drove on the road for 6 to 10 hours…While the absurd episodes of Linda and her neighbors and eccentric storytelling were introduced, laughter burst out from the audience seats.”
I have been following the practice and rehearsals of <All these roads…> as an outside eye in February 2025. I have heard of Linda’s story several times, but I am still trying to figure out who Linda is. At the beginning of the performance described above, audiences hear Linda’s story, who is deeply desired by the roads, and/but/therefore, is not going anywhere. Linda decides to exit society and stay home. Who on earth is Linda? After the storytelling, the narrator (Ella Ostlund) jumps onto the stage effortlessly and becomes Linda. While interpreting Linda’s movements as if they were ‘Morse code’, this weird character is sending to audiences, I imagine various ‘beings in their own homes alone’ to figure out who Linda is.
I recall women characters in early feminist novels like ‘Nora’ in <A Doll’s House> by Henrik Ibsen and ‘Susan’ in <To Room Nineteen> by Doris Lessing, who lost their identity and agency while keeping themselves at home to take care of families. My thoughts moved to the Japanese New Millennium social syndrome ‘hikikomori,’ a severe social withdrawal, and the current Korean social syndrome ‘Trash house’ caused by the old generation’s hoarding disorder and by the young generation’s extreme burnout, no energy to clean or make a decision. I struggle to place Linda on this spectrum of ‘beings in their homes alone.’ But Linda’s singularity is that she is completely fulfilled at home, without the need to leave home or go on adventures, with the support of a community, which keeps her deviating from the spectrum.
WHO ARE THE ROADS?
Then who are the ‘roads’ that desire Linda? The ‘roads’ in this story are multifaceted and metaphorical, just like the character Linda. The roads can be, as the saying ‘all roads lead to Rome,’ a symbolization of a civilized architecture constructed by the white male patriarchy of conquest war society; The roads can be a rhetoric that promises us eternal growth, an undercover of accumulation for millionaires’ profit, a political card that conservative growth advocators inevitably play when the economy is in recession; For idealists, the roads are an aspiration for a broader connectedness desiring to discover new world if it can hide the Columbian colonial nature beneath the ideal; For environmentalists, the roads are human violence toward the earth, extracting carbon from the ground into the atmosphere and covering it with asphalt and concrete; For materialists, roads are material agents entangled with us, bringing us back inevitable results and affecting our way of life and the discipline of our bodies.
(But where do my roads belong here? The one who called me during my early childhood, in my old memories, who made me walk endlessly without knowing I was a lost child.)
I think of each road above and trace the meaning of the roads in the story, who loves Linda and is rejected by Linda. We can start a conversation about this performance work by asking who the roads are to you.
THE AFFECT (NOT EFFICACY) OF ARTISTIC ‘IN-BETWEEN’
What if I dare to say that the roads are all of the above?…
Then ‘the roads’ become a hybrid of both, the human subject’s civilized architecture and the anthropomorphic non-humans considered as objects for a long time, mixed with dirt, sweat of laborers, pressure and energy of machines, and greed of those in power. ‘The roads’ boundaryless ‘in-between’ disrupts our binary thinking formula that wants to place the roads in one of the two poles, good and evil, complete unity or dichotomy.
Someone may demand this artwork to sharply point out ‘the roads’ as the result of anthropocentrism and make a socio-political critique of the present. Someone may feel uncomfortable with the ambiguous nuance of the anthropomorphic roads that love Linda, neither good nor evil. Someone may criticize artists for blurring the problem, the black side of the roads, extracting and burning the earth. Unlike the socio-political ways of thinking, artworks and artists often intuitively draw out this ambiguous state of ‘in-between’. Where does the in-between state invite the audience, the artists, and the artwork? What can the in-between state embrace? In other words, where do the ‘in-between’ states of Linda and anthropomorphic roads invite us to travel?
I questioned this since I participated in Lara Ostan’s previous project <Driver> as a collaborative performer, sharing the research process and producing two performance pieces, <White Line Fever> and <Before Lunch>. While working on <Driver> Project, we broadly researched the sociopolitical history of the truck transport industry intertwined with truck drivers’ personal histories, the cultural images of driving, the modernity’s teleology embedded in the image of endless horizons of the road, and diagram the body of truck and human in search of understanding truck mechanics and truckers’ labors. Perhaps at this point, you can guess where ‘the roads’ in <All these roads…> came from and the sarcastic but loving humor in the metaphor of roads. After this work, among other artworks, we received certain questions or doubts. It goes like this. ‘You artists seemingly chose the subject, truck drivers, alienated occupations, and driving, a critical subject in climate change, to speak out about the social issues. Why don’t you be more critical of the problems? What are you trying to say by taking an ambiguous attitude?
After taking in these questions for a while, I started to counter-analyze the questions and see what kinds of preconceptions they contain. Those questions have a perception that art has to point out the social issues, give an answer, and even solve the problem. So that artworks can prove their value and efficacy in society. This partly overlaps with Claire Bishop’s critical point on socially engaged art and the tension between artistic and social discourse mentioned in her book <Artificial Hells>.
“ The social discourse accuses the artistic discourse of amorality and inefficacy, because it is insufficient and merely to reveal, reduplicate, or reflect upon the world; what matters is social change. The artistic discourse accuses the social discourse of remaining stubbornly attached to existing categories, and focusing on micropolitical gestures at the expense of sensuous immediacy as a potential locus of disalienation… Art’s relationship to the social is either underpinned by morality or it is underpinned by freedom.”
Artworks have often been requested to be critical and find solutions. Does every piece of art have to be politically explicit and prove its value and efficacy in society? This writing invites you to ponder these questions together and squeeze into the space between the artistic and social discourse’s debate to stretch them out. What is the ‘affect’ of the artistic ‘In-between’ state, neither serving artistic freedom nor morality? I use the term ‘affect’ rather than ‘effect’ or ‘efficacy’ to avoid assessing artworks demanding a measurable outcome and social effect of art. Instead, I think of what was flowing between artworks and the experience of audiences and artists. To share my process of digesting these thoughts, I need to bring you to a slight detour.
ETHNOGRAPHY OF <DRIVER>
When we were in the middle of the <Driver> project from July 2023 until April 2024, I was in the same position as those questions above. At that time, I was not so long after reading socialist writings such as Silvia Federici’s <Caliban and Witch> and Jason Hekels’ <Less is More>, which revealed how capitalization divided reproductive labor and paid labor and made the former invisible commons like air, and demolished communities and commons. When we interviewed truck drivers from the UK, Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Hammerfest and listened to their experience of changing industries over several decades, I was shocked that what truckers experienced was reminiscent of the history of the emergence of capitalism at the end of middle age Europe described in the readings above.
In 1987, when Margaret Thatcher announced the neoliberal mantra, ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and families’, British truck drivers lost their workers’ unions in the name of ‘reorganization of labor.’ When the Euro currency was introduced in Spain in order to create a common market to increase economic prosperity in Europe, small transportation companies merged into one giant company and began to hire drivers temporarily on a project basis with no social security rather than employing them. Further, companies proposed that truckers buy trucks and use the sale as a condition of their contract. The effect of ‘owning a truck’ increased individual economic burden and further demolished the ‘cooperative social structure between drivers.’ Since individual truckers had more individual economic burdens, it was not affordable to join any collective laborer’s matters anymore. As Sociologist Ulrich Beck noted, ‘social problems are experienced as individual rather than collective, and we feel compelled to seek ‘biographic solutions to systemic contradictions’. I found that we, as freelance artists working without long-term contracts or workers’ unions, are in similar circumstances to them.
While we were in Barcelona rehearsing and interviewing in November 2023, Israel was bombing the Palestinian civilians outright. During the one year since then, we artists from the other side of the planet contacted each other, making statements, pushing institutions to speak out, and organizing fundraising events for Gaza. In only a few places on Earth, workers jointly protested this matter. Besides, as an individual freelance artist, an unsustainable, precarious occupation, it was difficult to imagine how to further protest the matter that we citizens disagree with. At the fundraising event for Gaza, one artist who was side-working for a dispatch company confessed to her witness of the transnational weapon industry. She had to confront the freight, a component of military zet, ready to be sent from Denmark to Israel, and the impossibility of obstructing this as a wage-worker without solidarity with anonymous other wage-workers in the company.
The social-political part of <Driver> research and the current situations awakened us to criticize the continuous social global injustices of the structure. At the same time, the frustration grew from the inability to solve and feeling trapped between three modes: fight, cry, and helplessness.
THE ARTISTIC ‘IN-BETWEEN’ ENCHANT
In April 2024, in Hammerfest, we continued our discussions around the manualization of truck driving labor and its surveiling character, which follows the footsteps of the modern systemic order of labor and time deluding emotion and social relation in them. It further led us to discuss modernity’s nature and its aspiration of progress, manifested in the symbolic images of the roads. We read Jane Bennett’s <The Enchantment of Modern Life> together and returned to the text several times during the process.
Since I am from a post-colonized country that experienced rapid, violent modernization, I have encountered tremendous demolition of traditional culture, worldview, and communities. At first, enchanting modernity was unimaginable for me. However, ‘enchanting modern life’ does not mean the critique about modernity is unnecessary; rather, it emphasizes the diffusive power of the joyful side in modern life, which has the potential to create an affective attachment to the world.
“For me, the question is not whether disenchantment (of modernity) is a regrettable or a progressive historical development. It is, rather, whether the very characterization of the world as disenchanted ignores and then discourages affective attachment to that world. The question is important because the mood of enchantment may be valuable for ethical life.”
From the beginning of the project, Lara was fond of ethnographic research in the truck driving industry; simultaneously, she invited collaborators to reflect on the dreams, love, and intimate side of driving. Those were faint and hard to grasp for me, but I could see them as hybridities of pre-modern and modernity in them, which can not be filtered by modernity’s reorganization of labor and time. Bennet’s texts reaffirmed the importance of not ignoring the other side of hybridities, the joyful side. “This life provokes moments of joy, and that joy can propel ethics…the ethical potential of the mood of enchantment”. Bennet’s ‘ethics’ in this writing is neither disciplinary or the humanitarian, christian ethic demanded by the social discourse in the previous quote from Bishop, but affective spontaneous side of ethic that arose by joy and enchanting the world.
From there, I re-read our interview documentation with the truck drivers and catch up on what I missed. On the other side of the socio-political critique of the truck transport industry, the truckers joyfully talked about their enthusiasm and pride in their work. They said, ‘Everything in this room has once been transferred by trucks, ’ pointing out how foundational their works are to the living of fellow citizens. ‘ We are the truckers who deliver food to the citizens in cities. When delivering food and ingredients to supermarkets, I feel I am a part of the whole supply chain in society.’ Although truckers work alone, spending a long time isolated in their trucks, they value their work through their contribution to the citizens and connection to the entire society.
Capitalism never paid for truckers’ and their feelings of connectedness with citizens. Regardless, truckers put further effort into their work out of those emotions. Humans do valuable work without getting paid, but on behalf of respect and joy from the connectedness. As Latour said, ‘we have never been modern’, our labor has never been completely the modernity’s concept of labor and time, and capitalistic monetization. We indeed need to acknowledge this contribution and appreciate these unintentional patterns of behavior of fellow citizens. And let these joys potentially crack the rigid manuals and policies of labor in capitalism.
THE ECHOING HEAD In-Between LOOKS BACK
During the rehearsal of <Driver>, there was a moment when a simple movement aroused internal sensations, emotions, and images. We called it the ‘echoing head’ score. It is the state of walking forward but looking back, moving toward the horizon but constantly turning my head to the side or back. Looking back was considered negative in Western patriarchal culture. While American Indians embrace looking back in order to wait for their soul to arrive while traveling for hunting, in Western mythology, you shall not look back, such as in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible. When God decided to punish the corrupt city, Sodom, Lot and his family escaped from Sodom. If they had not looked back, they could have escaped successfully and gone to the new world. However, Lot’s wife looked back and immediately turned into a pillar of salt. In that story, the one who looked back is not the subject of the adventure but one of the ‘others’, women. I thought this story implied Western patriarchy’s misogyny. Often, females are caring, sympathizing, and considerate of other people, or have been socialized as such. When women look back, patriarchy perceives them as weak, too emotional, inefficient, unproductive, or unconstructive. However, would Lot’s family have created an ideal world without looking back if they had gone to the new world? They did not have time to practice what kind of mindset, attitude, and behavior would be needed to heal the broken world and to organize the ideal world. Escaping does not seem enough to create a better world. The echoing head of Lot’s wife, who looked back, has a metaphor of caring for the wounded world and various beings living in it, which I believe is an essential practice for making different worlds.
The two artworks, <Driver>(Before Lunch and White Line Fever) and <All these roads…>, seemed to have a nuance of looking back like the ‘echoing head.’ If <Driver> made us look back at our personal dreams and social narratives about driving, and the truck transport industry, <All these roads…> seems like the state of looking back was manifested as a character, Linda. In <Driver>, the echoing head in between allowed us to look back and see both the tragic and joyful sides of the world. The echoing head allowed us to embrace both the critique and the enchantment of the world. While moving forward and looking back, the echoing head carefully picks up all those ambivalent hybridities and puts them into her carrier bag. The echoing head carries on all of them, preparing a bigger container so as not to neglect the joyful side and to avoid excluding those who do not belong in the limited spectrum.
Linda, who seems a materialized character of ‘looking back’, without the need to move forward, invites us to a strange and humorous state where she practices different attitudes and modes of living. Linda, an untold, unimagined character, adds a new mode of being to the spectrum of ‘beings in their homes alone’. To figure out this character, a game is going on between the artwork and the audience. While the artwork itself is building the character of Linda and ‘the roads’, audience members also continue this unfinished artmaking by adding their interpretation of Linda and the roads. We can continue this new story-making by attaching something foreign to what already existed or mixing it with something yet to come, searching for a new mode of living and making different worlds. Thanks to the game, the limited spectrum opens up and expands again.
Footnote
1. <All These Roads just for You> is one of the five works presented at the Danish National School of Performing Arts, 6th~9th of March, 2025. The quoted text is from the performance description written by the choreographer of this piece, Lara Vejrup Ostan.
2. This is from the review of the work written by me, which will be publish on Bastard.Blog in April, 2025.
3. Bishop, 2012, Artificial Hells, p.276
4. See the chapter of the Constructing “Difference” in the “Transition to Capitalism” in Silvia Federici’s Caliban and Witch and the part one: Capitalism: Creation History in Jason Hekels’ Less is More.
(…more footnote need to be added)
Bibliography
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society : towards a new modernity. Sage.
Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics: attachments, crossings, and ethics (1st ed.). Princeton University Press.
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells : participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso.
Ejsing, M. (2024). Why the turn to matter matters: A response to post-Marxist critiques of new materialism. Thesis Eleven, 181(1), 56–71.
Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the witch (2. revised edition.). Autonomedia.
Hickel, J. (2020). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. William Heinemann Ltd.
Latour, B. (1994). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. London: Ignota, 2019. Print.
Sharon Krause, 2015, <Freedom Beyond Sovereignty>
Thatcher, Margaret, 1987. ‘Interview for “Woman’s Own” (“No Such Thing as Society”).’ in Margaret Thatcher Foundation: Speeches, Interviews and Other Statements. London.
Credit
DRIVER (Vol I and Vol II)
With
Lara Vejrup Ostan choreographer
Yeong – Ran Suh dancer / choreographer / writer
Eva Johanna Forsehag dancer / choreographer
Ella Östlund dancer / choreographer
Thora Eriksen light design
Maximilian Philipp Tom Schwidlinski scenography
Moritz Nahold (Subletvis) composer / sound design
Bush Hartshorn mentor / truck driver
Christian Zander animation design
as well as
PRFRM producers
Kaiu Meiner graphic design
Andrés Perea videography
Benedicte Ramfjord photography
Sarah Olivia Klitgaard intern
Produced by
KOMMA Performance Productions
Co-produced by
Dansehallerne
Supported by
Statens Kunstfond
Holstebro Dansekompagni
Moving Identities Europe
Beckett Fonden
William Demant Fonden
Louis-Hansen Fonden
Vesterbro Lokaludvalg
Skuespillerforbundets Produktionsstøtte
Københavns Kommune Scenekunstudvalget
Goethe Institut, Culture Moves Europe – Mobility Funding
All These Roads Just For You
With
Lara Vejrup Ostan choreographer
Ella Östlund dancer / choreographer
Yeong – Ran Suh outside eye / writer
Moritz Nahold (Subletvis) composer
Jakob Juul light design
Þórunn Guðmundsdóttir photography
Produced by
DASPA (The Danish National School of Performing Arts)
yeongransuh.com 
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