Beyond the Accident Republic: Making Life and Safety with Disaster Memorials in Korea

In the same manner that disasters are political, so too are disaster memorials. Following the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster, the bereaved families worked quickly to establish institutions for self-protection, protest, investigation, and memorialization. This article contends that Sewol Ferry “memorial work” is a multi-faceted endeavor, involving several discrete types of expertise and action, including community education and outreach, urban spatial site advocacy, and scientific/forensic analysis. To make sense of this memorial work, we recount foundational memorialization efforts following the Sampoong Department Store collapse (1995) and the Daegu Subway Fire (2003) in which survivors and bereaved families pioneered memorial work techniques. Secondly, we track the evolving struggles over 4.16 memorialization in An-san, the hometown of the 250 students of Danwon High School who died in the disaster, culminating in the site and design selection process of the 4.16 Life and Safety Park. Finally, memorialization efforts recounted in this article have unfolded against the backdrop of multiple scientific/forensic investigations into the causes of the ship’s sinking and the recovery of human remains and victims’ belongings. In the slow disaster of the Sewol Ferry, memorialization is not the final stage, indeed in some crucial ways it may just be the beginning.