In 2016, as the artist’s research evolved to include a greater interest in authoritarian governmental systems, the artist traveled to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). On a visit to the Kimilsungia-Kimjongilia Flower Exhibition Hall in Pyongyang, the artist encountered an orchid named after Kim Il Sung (b. 1912–d. 1994), leader of the DPRK from 1948 until his death. As the book “Kimilsungia” describes, the flower received its name during Kim Il Sung’s 1965 visit to Indonesia:

He accompanied President Sukarno [of Indonesia] to the Bogoru Botanical Garden on April 13. [...] In the greenhouse, there were 80,000 tropical orchids. [...] He stopped his step in front of clusters of unusually beautiful flowers of orchids. They bore violet flowers blown successively on drooping flower stalks which came out of the articulated stems like a bamboo. [...]

Then Sukarno said, “I am going to call the flower Kimilsungia.”

“I have done nothing extraordinary. There is no need to name a flower after me, I think.”

“No, Your respected Excellency has already rendered enormous services to mankind. So you deserve a high honour.” [...]

Thus a new variety of flower named after the great man came into the world.¹

Upon learning of this information, Kimilsungia, became a multi-iteration site-specific project. For Reemtsma’s former tobacco factory in Berlin, Germany, the artist found a DPRK song written and composed to commemorate the Kimilsungia flower entitled “Kimilsungia in Full Bloom All over the World.” This song was recorded to cassette and then played on a boombox, a symbol of musical accessibility and expression, inside one of the rooms inside the factory. The cassette, much like other forms of analogue technology, becomes a trope of a disconnected society. One that is forced to interact with antiquted forms of media as technology creates connective webs to outside communities.