Research

  • Twilight Requiem
  • GRANTEE
    Stephanie Choi
    GRANT YEAR
    2023

Stephanie Choi, "Twilight Requiem," 2022. Digital animation still. Courtesy the artist

Twilight Requiem is an exploration of ritual and ceremonial objects used in quotidian life. It draws upon Korean folk art forms, aesthetics, and histories to imagine new rituals and objects. The project is a meditation on the twilight of life on earth as we know it. It draws from the Latin form of requiem mass to envisage cycles of rest and repose, restlessness and wandering. The repetitive space of ritual corresponds to the cyclical time of this reinterpretation of the requiem form. The project delves into Korean shaman ritual music and proposes new rhythmic cycles based upon the cosmological structure of the traditional janggu. This project attends to the sonic quality of Korean ritual objects and posits an Asia futurist vision in which new rituals are created in response to climate catastrophe. It ruminates on death, the afterlife, and the reverberation between realms.

Stephanie Choi works in architecture, installation, and video. In her research and teaching, she focuses on spatial justice in the built environment, specifically looking at how intersectional politics can shape environmental justice. Using the techniques of speculative fiction for worldbuilding, she engages in material culture and artifacts to examine the role of technology in the creation of a self in relation to the social. Choi is the founder of architecture and design practice Daphne and was the Emerging Scholar Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture for 2020–22. She was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany from 2014–16. She holds an MArch from Princeton and a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Stanford. She is licensed in the state of New York and taught at Rice Architecture.