Wanju Cultural Market Day@, how to play in the neighborhood

There are two sentences that best represent what ‘Wanju Cultural Market Day@’ has achieved from the year when it started as a pilot operation in 2020. The first is ‘Let’s play in the neighborhood!’, and the other is ‘We sell culture, not goods!’ As Wanju is very large in area and has a strange geographical structure surrounding Jeonju, it needed its own place where citizens can enjoy culture in their neighborhood, or living area. It can be viewed as like a ‘market day’ being held here and there all over Wanju. On that very point, Wanju Cultural Market Day@ started. They put @ after the project title, which means that it could be held at any place in the 13 eups or myeons of Wanju.

In fact, Wanju Cultural Market Day@ does not actually sell anything even though it’s a market day. It is a process of creating a culture that citizens want to share in a place they want. That’s why it is the citizens that are most important at Wanju Cultural Market Day@, because they have to manage the whole process of the cultural market day from deciding its place to planning and implementing it. Further, this year sees one more aspect added. It’s the ‘cultural locality’ found by the citizens.

This year, Wanju Cultural Market Day@ discovered a total of 9 places in five regions: Gosan, Gui, Dongsang, Bongdong, and Yongjin. Compared to last year's seven cultural market days, two more were held this year.

The first priority of the citizen planning team exploring places begins with talking and asking questions.

For two months, the team continued to ask questions one after another to the places they discovered. To get answers, they collected data at libraries and interviewed the people of the places in person. It was a chance to approach from various angle not only the places and their surrounding areas, but also the residents living there. Then, they could see the various resources and related stories which had remained unseen when they had only seen the places. The process of adding meaning and value to the various place resources and stories discovered by the team was carried out with a mentor. The process to arrange them through the citizen planning team was pleasant and yet quite serious at times. Over a period of two months, Over a period of about two months, they were called into action almost 50 times.

From September to November of this year, a variety of programs will be held in nine places visited and reinterpreted by local citizens with cultural plans, that can share cultural localities and values with neighbors.

Nine places, nine colors

The Silkworm Salon in Yongjin-eup was a place used to make money as a silkworm egg center. When it was moved to Buan Silkworm Town, the area which had been empty for a while was turned into a cultural complex. The location of the Silkworm Salon used to be the site of a company house, and now several communities manage it together. 8 members of the citizen planning team give life to its locality and dream of a culture that connects the past and the present, and then the future, like the thread silk worms produce. Reinterpreting the meaning of the place as the silkworm egg center, the team also developed various programs like a weaving experience program with silkworm thread. You can see and experience the various experiencing programs the team have prepared in the yard and alley of the Silkworm Salon. 

Along the route around the Mangyeong-gang (river), Bongdong-eup, you can enjoy ‘Mangyeong-gang Tour by Bicycle.’ It is a culture tour program promoting Wanju with its abundant historical and ecological cultural resources through a bicycle tour along the river. The citizen planning team d the Mangyeong-gang tour course, that goes from Mangyeong-gang bicycle rental station near the old Bongdong Bus Terminal to Seodu Village. A total of 4 Mangyeong-gang Bicycle Tours proceeded from September to November.

In Bongdong, cultural market days are held where citizens discuss the cultural usage of parks between apartments, and collect and share stories about their talents, eco-friendliness, and housekeeping. There is another cultural market day where they record and share the life history of the Singi-ri area where Bongdong’s native ginger, designated as an important national agricultural asset, remains

At Gosan Miso Market, there is a cultural market day called ‘Like Me, Like You, and As We Are’ held with the theme of ‘diversity’. At Gosan Miso Market, where you can find a Korean beef meat market, vegan stores, and old citizens and newcomers, the citizen planning team discovered respect, inclusion and diversity of the locality, seeing the coexistence of the old and the new. There are various programs held imagining a village that respects and embraces each other through books and films at the market.

Gosan-myeon’s Local Economic Circulation Center was once used as a school (Samgi Elementary School) in the past. Now, it has been reborn as a hub space for citizens’ cultural arts. The citizen planning team runs off the history and stories of spaces and citizens by listening to the village elders who graduated from the elementary school, through archives and storytelling.

In Dongsang-myeon, the Yeonseok-san (mountain) parking lot, which is mostly unused, will become a cultural plaza for the residents to use. Utilizing the abundant resources from Dongsang-myeon and Yeonseok-san, the team plans to transform the space into a place of exchange and harmony through culture.

At the shelter of the promenade of a reservoir in Gui-myeon, a concert called ‘Gui-reservoir talk concert’ will be held. It is a combination of a talk show and a concert with the theme of ‘abundance, meeting, and birth’ against the background of Gui Reservoir under the crystal clear autumn sky. The citizen planning team, composed of local young people, interpreted Moak-san and Gui Reservoir culturally based on the place names, origins, and stories of the area.

Wanju Cultural Market Day@, citizen’s ordinary culture playground

Since its inception in 2020, the Wanju Cultural Market Day @ project has developed to the point of discovering places in the living area from the eyes of residents and found a cultural sense of place. In particular, this year, with the active participation of the citizen planning team, more diverse cultural places were discovered. The Wanju Cultural Market Day@ project has the primary goal of regenerating places in a cultural way, rather than destroying and developing, but, secondarily, it puts more value on the point that residents experience and implement ways to protect and their city by themselves through the activities of the citizen planning team.

Wanju Cultural Market Day@ is not a simple citizen’s festival for the people to enjoy, but a sort of process to make a new citizen’s culture while citizens themselves interpret local places culturally. That’s why it is an experiment to make the city sustainable, while connecting and imagining its past, present, and future. This is the reason why Wanju Cultural Market Day@, the playground of Wanju citizens we see everywhere in Wanju, must continue in the future.