In 2006, Jin-me Yoon began crawling along the ground on a moving platform in Seoul, Vienna, Vancouver, Beppu (Japan), Mexico City, and Nagoya, the industrial centre of Japan, where this photograph was produced. Here, spurred by a notion of progress and grounded in a staunch belief in science and technology, a messianic architecture gives form to an image of the 21st century.

In each of these places, from her horizontal, worm’s-eye perspective, Yoon sees the past’s aspirations for the future in the built environments before her. These are images of the progress envisioned by Japanese colonialism, American imperialism, European high modernism, and Canadian settler colonialism. From this position she also sees the oppressed bodies that enabled modernity to strive towards those images in the first place.

As we move through these haunted places, a question surfaces again and again: “How do we move forward from current conditions in the context of these inherited histories?”