The House of Korean Protest Songs and its caretaker, Kim Young-Goo, joined the exhibition through the research conducted by fellow participating artist Minouk Lim for her work S.O.S–Fire Butterfly. In the lobby of the Busan MoCA, a selection of the archive is presented as a makeshift community center, a place for learning, listening, exchanging and gathering. Functioning as a “listening library”, this installation brings together protest songs, banners, publications, recordings, and other materials shaped by Korea’s pro-democracy, student, labour, and feminist movements. Kim’s archival focus on music underlines its importance as a vital conduit through which dissent was expressed, knowledge was transmitted, solidarity was stimulated and collective action was imagined.

Through its dissemination, the presentation challenges how historical documentation risks to remain cemented in the past, especially when it considers people-led grassroots movements, underground culture, and voices of dissent. Instead, the House of Korean Protest Songs is a living archive. Kim Young-Goo’s continuous efforts to preserve these testimonies defy their reduction to historical artefacts. By sustaining them as living forms of collective memory and political imagination, his collection resonates across generations, reminding us that our voices carry the power to imagine, articulate, and enact change.