Buro Stedelijk is pleased to present Every Worm Trampled Is a Star, the first European solo exhibition by Amsterdam-based artist Aram Lee. The exhibition marks the first presentation of her 2026 SONGEUN Art Award Grand Prize-winning work as a spatial installation.
Centred on Seoul's former Yongsan military base, the project imagines the voice and memory of the land itself. Through fragmented narratives, it traces memories held within the soil: displaced communities, buried microorganisms, erased landscapes, and the many attempts to occupy, map, flatten, and heal the site across generations.
For 138 years, the land of the Yongsan military base was closed off from the public through histories of colonisation, war, and military occupation. Once used as a training ground for the Imperial Japanese Army and later as a United States military garrison, the 750-acre site is now slowly being returned to public use.
At the centre of the exhibition is a video that imagines the voice and memory of the land itself. Through fragmented narratives, the work traces memories held within the soil: displaced communities, buried microorganisms, erased landscapes, and the many attempts to occupy, map, flatten, and heal the site across generations. Narrated by a third-generation Zainichi Korean (Koreans forcibly relocated to Japan), the work follows intertwined histories of displacement, ecological change, and the site's gradual return to public use.
At the entrance, a topographic wall installation developed in dialogue with Rotterdam-based landscape architects West 8 (whose proposal won the bid to re-develop Yongsan site) envisions the recovery of the site's topography as part of its transformation into South Korea's first national urban park. For this presentation, Lee has expanded the work into a suspended glass installation, where voices, sounds from the landscape, and recordings from inside the soil resonate through glass as fragile vibrations.
In Aram Lee’s work, the trampled worm stands in for lives, memories, and forms of knowledge rendered vulnerable or invisible, yet capable of cosmic transformation.
