Hybrid Heritage @ Symposium DMZ Botanic Garden Korea

10th Anniversary
International Symposium
DMZ Botanic Garden

Program

Event 10th Anniversary International Symposium of the DMZ Botanic Garden
Theme Advancing Biodiversity Conservation and Peace Cooperation
Dates Thursday–Friday, 1-2 October , 2026
Day 1 International Symposium, Korea National Arboretum
Day 2 Field Tour & Commemorative Events, DMZ Botanic Garden
Hosted by Korea Forest Service and Korea National Arboretum
In collaboration with CBD Secretariat Forest Ecosystem Restoration Initiative and Peace and Biodiversity Dialogue Initiative

1 October 2026

13:30–13:35: Opening Opening and introduction of speakers
13:35–13:40: Welcome Welcome address, Director General, Korea National Arboretum
13:40–13:55: Remarks Congratulatory remarks Ministry of Unification and invited organizations
14:00–14:25: A Decade of International Cooperation: Advancing the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework through FERI and the Peace and Biodiversity Dialogue, CBD Secretariat representative (TBC)
14:25–14:50: Presentation, Madhu Rao, Chair, IUCN WCPA
14:50–15:15: Presentation, Annette Wallgren, UNEP
15:15–15:40: Presentation,  Prof. Elisabeth Sikiaridi, Hybrid Space Lab
15:40–16:05: Presentation, Anthony Allison, Partnerships for Nature
16:15–16:35: Experience and challenges in environmental peace cooperation, Hyuna Choi, Hanns Seidel Foundation
16:35–16:55: Current status of forests in Korea’s Civilian Control Zone Younghwan Park, Korea Forest Service
16:55–17:15: Ecological resource research for sustainable development in border regions, Prof. Kyungjin Cho, Seoul National University
17:15–17:35: Biodiversity status of the Korean border region, Hogeun Yoon, DMZ Botanic Garden
17:35–18:00: Questions and discussion
18:00: Dinner

2 October 2026

09:30–10:30: Transfer Transfer to the DMZ Botanic Garden Group transportation
10:30–10:45: Introduction Introduction to the DMZ Botanic Garden Director, DMZ Botanic Garden
10:45–11:15: Ceremony 1, Peace Time Capsule Sealing Ceremony Distinguished guests
11:15–11:45: Ceremony 2, Commemorative Peace Tree Planting Distinguished guests
11:45–13:00: Lunch, Speakers and Participants
13:00–14:30: Field Tour Guided tour of the DMZ display gardens 
14:30–16:00: Concert PLZ Peace & Life Zone Concert, Mijung Lim, Artistic Director, PLZ
16:00: Closing

Hybrid Space Lab has long been internationally engaged with the transformation and resignification of controversial and emotionally charged monuments, cultural sites, and memorials, Hybrid Space Lab was invited to South Korea in 2019 to participate in a program at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

DMZpace

In South Korea, Hybrid Space Lab was invited by an interdisciplinary group of curators of contemporary art, environmentalists, landscape architects, and experts in regional development. With our project DMZpace in Soi-san, close to the Demilitarized Zone, we developed a spatial concept to support the reading of the multifaceted traumatic dimensions of this landscape.

The DMZpace pavilion Hybrid Space Lab designed is a triangular (infra)structure and artificial topography that serves as a perceptual amplifier for the panoramic view from Soi-san; an instrument for unfolding the complex layers of the site and for exploring and processing its traumatic history.
The Soi-san hill, now located in the civilian-controlled area on the southern border of the DMZ, historically served as a site for transmitting messages via light signals. Later, it offered a view of Cheorwon, a city with a population of approximately 38,000 that was completely destroyed in 1945 during the Korean War. Due to its strategic location, Soi-san Hill is home to an in the meantime abandoned U.S. Army observation post.

When Korea was divided into two, the water supply to the rice paddies south of the Demarcation Line near Cheorwon was also cut off. As a result, artificial lakes were created to irrigate the fields. This attracted flocks of cranes. Today, the Soi-san Lookout serves as a vantage point for observing the cranes.
The trail, designed as part of the DMZpace project, allows visitors to experience this complex history firsthand as they climb the natural slope of the Soi-san hill and follow the path through the artificially shaped topography of the DMZpace Pavilion. At the same time, the pavilion houses the infrastructure needed to explore, process, and reinterpret this traumatic landscape.

NatureCulture

The DMZpace Pavilion thus also serves as a gate to a historical understanding of how the region became an ideal habitat for cranes—symbols of peace—which convey the regenerative potential of these conflict-ridden landscapes. From European mythologies, in which cranes appear as omens that deliver messages, to the red-crowned cranes in Korea—which are regarded as symbols of longevity, purity, and peace—cranes represent insightful communication across great distances and borders.
The DMZpace project thus moves away from an anthropocentric approach focused on human history and its hostilities, adopting a bird’s-eye view to symbolically promote cross-border exchange and communication. From this perspective, which takes into account diverse species, vegetation, and wildlife, human conflicts appear in a different light.

This also applies to the European Green Belt and the German Green Belt—projects in which natural monuments along formerly militarized borders foster dialogue and where the transformation of border regions into nature reserves and peace parks supports exchange and mutual learning. Here, too, environmentally conscious creativity can help overcome the divisions of the 20th century. The Green Belt, as a hybrid natural and cultural heritage site, can serve as a model for practices that view nature and culture as closely intertwined.

Against the backdrop of the current challenges posed by the climate crisis and the increasing loss of biodiversity, adopting a “more-than-human” perspective is a widespread approach that reflects a conceptual shift. Awareness of the interdependence of humans, animals, and plants compels us to overcome the dichotomy between nature and culture. Based on an ecological awareness—according to which humans must take their fellow inhabitants of the world into account in order to survive as a species—culture is shifting away from an anthropocentric approach toward a comprehensive understanding of the world as a web of relationships, as a hybrid of nature and culture.

As part of our DMZpace project, we organised the “Convers(at)ions” event in 2020 as a forum for exchange between stakeholders in the Korean DMZ and the European Green Belt. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this exchange took place as an online event in fall of 2025.

The Koreans have shown great interest in the long-standing and well-established German Green Belt and European Green Belt projects. They hope—while fully aware that the circumstances are very different and the experiences therefore cannot be directly transferred—to gain important insights from these processes. And they are deeply inspired by these new approaches to border landscapes as well as by the synergies between ecological corridors, peace, and sustainable futures. They are also profoundly fascinated by the peace-building potential of the European Green Belt project—the transformation of a harsh, deadly border into an ecological corridor and the backbone of a peaceful continent.

Narrative

In general, the narrative of the European Green Belt exerts a very strong appeal worldwide as a symbol of the possibility of a peaceful future—on a continent that has been constantly at war with itself in the past. We may not be fully aware of this very strong international appeal of the Green Belt. Consequently, the potential that this narrative unlocks has not yet been fully realized.

Trans-disciplinarity

The European-Korean exchange served as a source of mutual enrichment. German and European stakeholders, too, can learn from the South Korean initiative. From the outset, this initiative had a strongly interdisciplinary focus, involving curators of contemporary art who collaborated with environmentalists, landscape architects, and experts on regional development issues.

The challenges involved in transforming such conflict-ridden landscapes are extremely complex and therefore require the integration of various disciplinary perspectives. European and German experts can thus draw inspiration from the innovative transdisciplinary approach of the South Korean project.

Artistic
Research

Beyond trans-disciplinarity, such projects also require the incorporation of artistic research. For this reason, the South Korean initiative also incorporates artistic and creative practices to transform conflict tourism into peace tourism—with the long-term goal of transforming the DMZ into a natural monument and a peace park.

By exploring uncharted territory, artists and creatives have the ability to develop visions and shape new narratives. They thus possess the transformative power to engage creatively with the phenomenology and performativity of hard borders in order to reinterpret “negative spaces”—such as military border zones and conflict landscapes. Cultural practitioners can therefore help open up possibilities for desirable transformations. Artistic speculation and cultural production are thus strategic tools for navigating complexity, exploring desirable visions of the future, and unlocking the potential for positive change.

Outsiders’
Perspective

While working on the DMZpace project, we were particularly struck by a conversation with a young Korean woman from Seoul. For her, the DMZ was a void that she could not perceive. And she said that our outsiders’ perspective helped her come to terms with this negative space.
Hybrid Space Lab had the same experience with the Deep Space project to re-signify the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) memorial, one of the most controversial active memorials in the world, close to Madrid. Here, too, our outsiders’ perspective was needed to shed new light on a seemingly intractable conflict in Spain.

Throughout history, such outsiders’ perspectives have repeatedly proven helpful in opening up new angles on controversial and intractable situations. Among such precedents are the historical reassessment of Vichy France under the Pétain government (by foreign historians and researchers such as Robert Paxton, Robert Soucy, Eugen Weber, and Zeev Sterhell), of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Poland (by Jan Gross, a Polish-American Jewish historian, as well as the Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski and the French journalist and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann), and the reappraisal of Dutch colonial history and war crimes in Indonesia (by the Swiss-Dutch historian Remy Limpach).
External perspectives could also prove fruitful in connection with the European Green Belt and the German Green Belt. Here too, where local history can be painful, an outsiders’ perspective offers the opportunity to view these places in a new light—as a key to initiating processes of reinterpretation and of changing their public significance.

Participative

The transformation of conflict-ridden areas involves addressing complex issues that require consideration of a broad spectrum of demands and voices. What is therefore needed is a diversity of perspectives—incorporating both external viewpoints and the perspectives of local stakeholders.
Such a collective process of coming to terms with the past, aimed at reinterpreting territories, reflects the broader and more far-reaching call for more inclusive historical narratives. This requires participatory formats that contribute to integrative outcomes and enable inclusive collective processes of memory-making and resignification.

Deep Space, which seeks to reinterpret the Valley of the Fallen, was also conceived as a transdisciplinary, participatory process—a workshop involving Spanish and international creatives from the fields of architecture, design, art, and theater; historical research; ethnology; forensic archaeology; cultural heritage and cultural studies; law; psychology; and psychoanalysis; as well as those personally affected. During the workshop, proposals were developed for the reinterpretation of the Valle de los Caídos and for its transformation from a monument into a memorial place. The project’s greatest contribution, however, was to support and foster the public process of coming to terms with the past.

Process
Oriented

Such participatory projects are aimed less at a final outcome and more at supporting the long, time-consuming processes necessary for the transformation of conflict-affected areas. By linking different cultural experiences and forms of knowledge, they are part of a broader, inclusive process of remembrance and collective coming to terms with the past. By opening up spaces for constructive, inspiring dialogue that incorporates a diversity of perspectives, such processes can help build bridges between communities to overcome polarization.

This process-oriented approach also involves taking small steps, carrying out small projects, and having the courage to experiment—and to learn from both successes and failures. Throughout this process, considering our fellow inhabitants of this world—animals and plants—can help us place unresolved historical human wounds into a new temporal context within the longevity of nature. Incorporating diverse perspectives and creativity when engaging with conflict-affected landscapes can help uncover the complex layers of such traumatized places and make them legible—with the goal of reinterpreting, transforming, and passing these landscapes on to future generations.