One day Gyeong-ha receives a message from her friend In-seon, who lives on Jeju Island, South Korea. She has injured herself working with wood and has been rushed to the mainland, but has left behind a small bird that risks dying of hunger. In her novel We Do Not Part, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Han Kang confronts one of the darkest chapters in Korean history: the bloody suppression of the Jeju uprising in 1948. Daria Deflorian traverses and interrogates this unsettling text, sharing with Han Kang a refusal to reduce tragedies to the bare names of cities and the count of the dead. To draw close to that past which refuses to pass, we must allow ourselves to be traversed by human fragility and by everything that inevitably touches us. Perhaps then we will be “admitted among the ghosts”.

Through a lifelong search for a beloved person, the work explores the ways in which the brutal and totalising nature of violence flattens every individuality, but also how a tenacious hope can save a single person who has fallen into oblivion, touching and illuminating the lives of other victims. An “archive of love”, as Didi-Huberman might have said, in which survival passes through fragile, interrupted images, on the verge of disappearing. And yet, obstinately present. Inside and outside the novel, on stage, through three figures, the two central relationships of this affective resistance: the friendship between the two protagonists, and the troubled, hard-won bond between mother and daughter. It is in the carpentry workshop — which In-seon has converted from her mother’s old mandarin orange storehouse — that the action unfolds across a long night in which everything that is evoked has happened before or after, while the dialogues between and with the ghosts are the only true present.