Multimedia installation with video, sculpture and paintings; a collaboration between human, machine, plants, insects, light, darkness, dirt, rocks, water, rain, spirits...

Dimensions change with time and space.

Statement

In this on-going project I continue my engagement with the concept of the garden. As a versatile, permutable and moving site, the garden here is a living entity capable of birth, mutation, and rebirth in different contexts and conditions.

The Garden is a vast library whose pages are endlessly inscribed by words of men and women, sounds of worms, bugs, ghosts, gourds, instruments, conduits,... as they whisper. The garden is also an eternal witness that bears enduring testimony to our actions... 

Doing a multimedia project (video, painting, sculpture) is like starting a garden or stepping into a dream. It is not important to understand nor to explain but to be able to see together that the beginning of a path does not just stop at some form, some entrance; it requires different entryways to go further into who-knows-where, to take on a risk...

It is said that on August 10, 1961, a helicopter flew along Route 14, following the Trường Sơn Tây Nguyên Trail through the Vietnam - Cambodia - Laos border... Carving against the sky, the aircraft was tailed with a beautiful strip of color... People, trees, grass, insects, hills and rivers below were bathed in a colorful rain. At that moment, none of those beings knew that it was the beginning, that it was a signal for a dream shared by many generations to come...

“Trail Dust” was the codename used in classified messages for herbicide operations during the Vietnam War. The US military sprayed toxic chemicals that defoliated the forests in order to incapacitate the camouflage and hiding tactics of the Southern Liberation Army and Vietnam People’s Army. This operation also caused long-term destructive effects to life above ground, underground, and in water bodies...

People say: watching a movie is like observing a dream, following shadows, or holding a breath in one’s palm... All elements in a video are at once present and absent, visible and invisible. It never stands still and always mutates. It freely shapeshifts, converging and diverging past any frames and rules. 

Combining video with sculpture, this project is guided by the term disorientation.

Here, disorientation is a state of no self-control, or forgetfulness. It is tangent to a state of madness, insanity or being possessed (losing or misplacing a soul), no longer recognizing what is happening around you, or seeing everything upside down... 

Traveling along the border between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. (Trường Sơn -Tây Nguyên trail, also known as the Indochina T-junction) This is the border between natural and cultural marriages which have been cast off by colonialism and nationalism. Originally a densely forested region with a rich cultural tapestry from more than 50 ethnic communities who call it their home, this area has been heavily impacted by wars and resource exploitation.

The anonymous human character in the video wanders through landscapes bearing traces of history, through the space of visible and invisible social conflicts, a site of exploitation, manslaughter, and murder... This character becomes a transit point, transcending concepts of space and time, crossing the border of classifications, using the cries and sounds from a traditional bamboo instrument to evoke a transmissive and attuned field of connections between the invisible and the visible, the real and the mythical, the awake and the dreaming...

Along with the anonymous character are light spots that trace plants, insects, soil, water, animals, soldiers, mothers... We understand that the light is a conductor for metamorphosis. It is dualistic, absurd, shamanic, and shape-shifting. The light spots in the video “a breath of dreams’’ are like ghosts, obsessive and illusionary. They are vehicles of memory, souls that often return in dreams to see their loved ones and loved landscapes.

A system of images projecting traces of life and land, traces of river, traces of war history, traces of displacement, exile, separation, discrimination, denial, amnesia... People call it - the Central Highlands in the mindscape - the in-between land: between village and forest, between nature and decay, between life and death, between the awake and the dreaming, between reality and illusion, between a lost land and a withering land, between a place whose name we don’t know and a place we have not encountered... People often slip from one to the other.

Statement is excerpted from "The Disoriented Garden…A Breath of Dream" Exhibition Booklet, 2023, p.67-69.