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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231212T080000
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SUMMARY:Patricia Nguyễn discusses moving through memory in performance art
DESCRIPTION:Patricia Nguyễn performs “Passage” at the Media Art Gallery.\n\n\n\nBy Maddie Browning \n\n\n\nPatricia Nguyễn is an artist\, scholar\, and educator with work surrounding the aftermath of the Vietnam War and memory\, loss\, and healing. She utilizes performance art to understand how the feeling of water and land on her body reflect the emotions and experiences of Vietnamese refugees.  \n\n\n\nHer work is a part of Emerson Contemporary’s “One Day We’ll Go Home” exhibition running through December 16. \n\n\n\nEmerson Contemporary connected with Nguyễn via Zoom to discuss her journey developing performance art\, her conversations with refugees and their families\, and what she hopes people learn from her art.  \n\n\n\nEC: When did you start developing performance art? \n\n\n\nNguyễn: I was trained in devised theater throughout elementary school\, and then in high school\, I did performance poetry and spoken word. It wasn’t until I went to Vietnam in 2010\, and I encountered state surveillance and censorship [that] it transformed my work in performance poetry and theater into performance art to think about the power of how the body can help tell the story and what the body remembers.  \n\n\n\nEC: What artists are you inspired by? \n\n\n\nNguyễn: [Okwui Okpokwasili]. She did this amazing piece called “Bronx Gothic.” A lot of the people that inspired my work are Black feminists and women of color\, feminists\, artists\, poets\, theater makers.  \n\n\n\nThe person that trained me is the first woman performance artist in Vietnam\, and her name is Ly Hoàng Ly\, who I have this lifetime performance with called “Memory vs. Memory.” She really helped me understand what performance art is and what it can do through collaborating with her. “Memory vs. Memory” began because both of our fathers were located on opposing sides of the Vietnam War. We’re their children\, their daughters\, and we inherit the memories that they’ve had to go through in particular because they’re the same age on opposing sides of the war and were both incarcerated after the end of the war – her father in an old French colonial prison\, my father in the jungles near the border of Vietnam and Cambodia. So\, for us\, delving into performance art\, delving into the cultural memory of specific objects like water or soil or metal\, conjures these memories that are linked to our own fathers’ histories of revolution and war and incarceration.  \n\n\n\nEC: You say in your artist statement that land and water are crucial to your process. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about that.  \n\n\n\nNguyễn: So the word for homeland\, country\, and nation in Vietnamese is “Đất nước\,” which respectively means land and water\, but in the diaspora land drops off\, so the shorthand for saying homeland or country is “nước” or just water. So a lot of my work delves into the materiality of water itself\, like\, how does water soak into my body? How do I understand the porousness of my own skin? And how do we tap into both the internal waters that we already have and the external waters that I play with in performance when I drown myself in water\, soak my myself with drenched fabric. How does that evoke the memory both within and external to me about whatever question I’m meditating on in relationship to the aftermath of the Vietnam War?  \n\n\n\nA lot of Vietnamese were forced to migrate by boat and over water\, so a lot of them are known as boat refugees. I think about the materiality of water not just as a landscape of where forced migration happens\, but as this place of life and death. I’ve interviewed so many different Vietnamese refugees\, and all of them have said\, “I was so thirsty on that boat\, and there was water all around me and I couldn’t drink any of it.” The ocean is made up of saltwater\, and saltwater could help you if you have a sore throat – you can gargle it – but if the ratio of saltwater is too much\, it becomes toxic. So what is this line between what is healing and what is toxic? So really thinking about water\, not only as a metaphor\, but literally what does it do to the body?  \n\n\n\nAnd then land\, so my father was incarcerated on former US military bases that had landmines in them. So land was literally weaponized against the Vietnamese people\, both by the US government\, and also in the aftermath of war as people who were drafted in the south of Vietnam that were aligned with the US also were incarcerated on these very lands. The precarity of life and death is contingent on if the bomb will explode.  \n\n\n\nEC: Going back to you talking about how you have interviewed a lot of refugees\, how do you approach people that are hurting and tell their stories? \n\n\n\nNguyễn: So for refugees\, they have to prove what they’ve been through to even gain refugee status. So the process of conducting oral histories is hopefully more of a reparative act\, where it’s not just like\, “Let me extract your story to see if you qualify for this paperwork or the status for particular rights and privileges.” It’s like\, “Let me actually listen and ask you your story.” The way that I conduct oral histories\, it’s based off of a relationship that I’ve already had with people\, so either I’ve known them for quite some time\, so they can trust me with their stories\, or I’m introduced to them by someone who they already trust and that person is either in the room with me or has done a lot of the prep work to help support that person. So it’s always based in rapport and consent.  \n\n\n\nIt’s really just being as present as possible and doing deep listening and gauging what people are comfortable with and what people are not comfortable with. At the end of the interview\, I always check in with them\, making sure that they’re okay\, asking them if there’s anything else they want to share. And I ask I leave them with a hopeful question like\, “What do you hope for yourself or your children or future generations?” or “What do you want to leave us with and what do you want us to learn?” so that it’s not a line of questions that focus on trauma or pain. It’s more of a line of questions and invitations to share and understand these histories with one another. I try to help those that I’m interviewing feel empowered after the interview that their story is important and what they went through was significant and that they’re not alone. \n\n\n\nEC: You received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2010 to work in Vietnam and co-founded Cây\, “the first life skills and art therapy reintegration program for human trafficking survivors along the border regions of Vietnam\,” according to your website. Tell me more about the program and why you created it. \n\n\n\nNguyễn: So originally\, I was supposed to go to Vietnam or Cambodia to work with survivors of sex trafficking and human trafficking. But the Vietnamese and Cambodian government shut down the organization that I was going to work with a week before my application was due. Luckily\, my friend worked in Vietnam and works with an anti-human trafficking organization and brought me on to it.  \n\n\n\nI had a lot of pushback going back to Vietnam from my own family. They were like\, “We escaped from there. Why would you go back?” For me\, it was really important to see the other side of war and to see those that are still impacted by its aftermath\, even if not in the way that we understand how people are directly impacted\, but just in terms of the new neoliberal development policies and how that impacts indigenous folks who are also known as ethnic minorities. I wanted to see how development is impacting those who live in poor and rural areas\, and who are being heard and neglected by the government and to work on young women’s empowerment through the arts. So I co-founded that program with my friend who was also interested in arts education\, and we were interested in exploring how arts can be this tool to support people to express themselves and make sense of the conditions that they’re living in and feel like they can build community around that because art is the first thing that was used for the war in terms of propaganda and gaining public support\, but it’s also the thing that is most censored and most surveilled.  \n\n\n\nEC: At Emerson\, you performed “Passage” on November 14. What story were you telling through that performance? \n\n\n\nNguyễn: There was this beautiful photo that I had seen of a Vietnamese woman with her conical hat\, and she was surrounded by all these beautiful green fishing nets\, and she just loved her\, so that’s what inspired the material that I worked with. I worked with different color tulle that evoked the water itself\, and the water at different depths. I played with different colors of tulle to show the different dimensions and layers of water. In thinking about the creation of “Passage\,” when you walk through the gallery space\, you first walk into Tiffany Chung’s piece\, and her piece is really about the forced migration right after the war. And then in the middle\, you have Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s installation video\, “[The] Boat People” where they land on this refugee camp\, so it’s from the journey of leaving to the refugee camp\, and then my three channel installation is at the far end of the gallery\, and it’s really challenging the notion of refugee resettlement. So it’s kind of like if you move through the gallery\, that’s the story that I saw\, from departure to this liminal space of the refugee camp\, to this place of resettlement.  \n\n\n\nSo in the middle of the gallery space\, I wanted to imagine that it was all water\, and the tulle evoked that sense of water. So I started the performance in the middle of Tiffany’s installation. And part of what I did was\, I sunk into all this tulle that was surrounding me to be with the material\, meditate with her piece\, and have it be infused into my performance work. And then I carry the tulle into the main gallery space\, and part of carrying the tulle is imagining\, “What does it mean to literally try to carry water?” And it’s spilling over\, it cannot be contained in any way. Then I dive into the tulle\, and I’m wrestling in the midst of it\, trying to explore my breath\, trying to explore tension\, trying to explore moments of feeling like I’m swimming or floating or drowning or shifting and just thinking about what the space could be. And meanwhile what’s being projected onto me from the projector above are these incremental numbers that are going up and down in different ways to symbolize the number of growing refugees that are left to die at sea or abandoned by nation states or government.  \n\n\n\nSo that’s being projected on my body as I’m moving under and with and through the tulle and exploring expansion and contraction and breath and thinking about the bodies that were forced to migrate by sea and those that drowned or were thrown overboard or couldn’t make it. What does it mean to dive deep into the ocean where these bodies have landed? So then I struggle to get out of the tulle and go back in because the answer isn’t resettlement. The answer isn’t\, “Let me arrive at some place\, and it’ll save me. Let me get out of the water.” It was really thinking about\, “Let’s return to the water\,” and “What can the water teach us\, and how can we build other worlds and imaginaries through the water?” And then I worked with Fiona Fiona Ngô who created a really beautiful experimental sound piece that really framed the performance and was a call in response to the piece. \n\n\n\nEC: Your Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans bio states that growing up your parents told you stories about their experience escaping Vietnam during the war as boat refugees to Malaysia and Indonesia and resettling in the United States in the ‘80s. How do those stories inform your work? \n\n\n\nNguyễn: They deeply inform my work in that they are the ones that I’m theorizing with. They helped me understand the political stakes of war in how they’ve survived and how they don’t want that to happen to anyone else in any capacity. So I draw on their stories to create my performance gestures\, and I draw on their stories and their legacies to think about\, “What is the purpose of this work?” and really thinking about how it’s to connect with audiences to share these histories and these stories. That’s how they want their stories to be passed on. \n\n\n\nEC: What do you hope people learn from experience in your art? \n\n\n\nNguyễn: I hope it offers a space for people to grieve and to mourn\, especially as we’re witnessing different levels of violence all the time. I want people to understand that war and the process of nation building always results in forced migration\, always results in the predetermination of who gets to live and who gets to die or who has to die for someone else to live. I want people to learn the human stakes of what it means to delve into these histories\, not only just as something that’s happened in the past\, but as a lens to think about the future\, as a way to think about how we can build a better world by not forgetting and erasing the violences and the ugly histories and the heartbreaks of the past. How do we acknowledge them and also transform them so that we can build a better world\, a better future for all of us and other generations to come? \n\n\n\nThis interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
URL:https://emersoncontemporary.org/event/patricia-nguyen-discusses-moving-through-memory-in-performance-art/
CATEGORIES:Artist Spotlight,Artist Talk,News
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231215T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231216T170000
DTSTAMP:20260408T090351
CREATED:20240214T150326Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240214T151004Z
UID:10000065-1702627200-1702746000@emersoncontemporary.org
SUMMARY:Musician Julian Saporiti approaches refugee storytelling with compassion
DESCRIPTION:By Maddie Browning \n\n\n\nBerklee alum Julian Saporiti releases music inspired by his fieldwork and research on Asian American history under the pseudonym No-No Boy – a reference to John Okada’s novel of the same name.  \n\n\n\nA selection of his songs and music videos are a part of Emerson Contemporary’s “One Day We’ll Go Home” exhibition on display through December 16.  \n\n\n\nEmerson Contemporary chatted with Saporiti on Zoom about his favorite musical artists\, collaborating on artistic projects with his wife\, and checking his privilege with the monks at Blue Cliff Monastery. \n\n\n\nEC: What artists are you inspired by? \n\n\n\nSaporiti: There’s a painting in the MFA in Boston called “Slave Ship” by [Joseph Mallord William] Turner\, and when I was in school at Berklee\, I would go see that painting a lot. It’s a really horrible subject matter\, it’s this wrecked slave ship\, so it’s all these bodies in the ocean but it’s full of [these] beautiful sunset or sunrise colors – oranges and pinks – mixed with the turbulence of the ocean. So that was always super striking\, and very similar to a lot of the work that I do\, which is dealing with stories of people crossing oceans under not so good circumstances. But that painting\, I was always entranced by that when I lived in Boston\, and I would go see that all the time.  \n\n\n\nEC: What are some of your favorite musicians? \n\n\n\nSaporiti: When I was in Boston\, as a [college student]\, I used to go to the symphony every week and the BSO because they had a student card\, so you go every Thursday for like 25 bucks a semester. I remember I saw this piece\, Hector Berlioz is the composer\, and he wrote a piece called “The Damnation of Faust\,” which is this overwhelming three choruses based on the Faust mythology\, and that’s one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. And then I also love the rock and roll or hard rock I grew up with like Rage Against the Machine and Weezer and Nirvana and all that grunge stuff. And then my dad’s record collection\, The Beatles\, Beach Boys\, Joni Mitchell\, Neil Young\, Bob Dylan.  \n\n\n\nI like all that very entrenched\, canonized stuff\, but my favorite experiences are just hearing someone in front of me play an instrument. It doesn’t even have to be a particular piece of music. It’s just like\, if there’s a clarinet player in an Italian restaurant\, I’m always drifting out of whatever conversation I’m in to hear just the sound of their instrument. I’m really appreciative of live music because there’s just something so captivating and infinite in that very small experience that you can’t get with recorded music.  \n\n\n\nEC: Your music is rooted in storytelling. How do you use different sounds to tell those stories? \n\n\n\nSaporiti: A lot of different ways. Sometimes it’s just textures of different instruments [that] might fit a lyric\, you know\, the difference between a plucked guitar with your fingers to a nice ethereal keyboard pad or something. I use a lot of samples\, and I tell a lot of stories that are based on my historic research as an academic – these histories of Asian American folks and refugees and immigrants mostly. I sample from my field research sites\, so if I go to an old refugee camp or something\, I’ll knock on the barbed wire or the wood\, and then I’ll turn that into a drum kit. So that’s what you hear on my recorded music to try to use the textures and real audible sounds of history inside the records themselves.  \n\n\n\nEmpire Electric by No-No Boy\, album cover. \n\n\n\nEC: What has your experience been like collaborating with your wife\, Emilia\, who directs and does lettering for your music videos featured in “One Day We’ll Go Home”? \n\n\n\nSaporiti: Awesome because we want to be around each other as much as possible. That’s why we got married. I have found someone who I just love sharing my life with\, and my life is so artistically driven\, it would kind of be impossible for me to be in a full time relationship with someone if they didn’t share in that and vice versa. Like right now you’ve caught me in the middle of her law school exam final week\, so I’m basically chauffeur and making all the meals and helping her study with flashcards and making sure the sleep schedule is good. So we look at everything we do as a team. And she’s a wonderful artist in her own right – a visual artist. She helps me produce the songs that I make as well. She sings when we perform live. She also has sewn this incredible stage jacket I wear in one of the videos which has hand embroidered little stories from my Vietnamese American childhood on it. \n\n\n\nEC: Tell me a little bit more about the songs you included in “One Day We’ll Go Home” and what stories you are telling. \n\n\n\nSaporiti: “Boat People” is in there and that is very central to the Vietnamese American story because I think most refugees or a good deal of us can trace their families where they directly came over as boat people. These folks who had to escape South Vietnam on these rickety little fishing boats. That song is taken directly from an archival interview of this guy who was a boat person who went to Canada. The lyrics basically tell this really cinematic story of this guy\, Dr. Tran\, who eventually made it to Montreal but he had to escape Vietnam\, got into this little fishing\, boat pirates attacked them\, eventually made it to Pulau Bidong – this refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia. It’s harrowing\, and I think that it’s really important to tell one story at a time as a teacher and also as a songwriter because it’s really hard for students or for listeners to take in a million people. You can’t understand that number\, so boiling it down to telling these personal stories detail by detail\, and then setting it to music\, I think that’s a very emotional way to speak to this larger humanity issue of refugees and immigrants and movements of people – things that are happening right now in the Middle East\, right now in Asia and Central America. This is just one person\, but if you can empathize with that one person\, then maybe you can empathize more deeply with the global issue of refugees and displacement. \n\n\n\nEC: In conducting your field work\, how do you go about talking to refugees when you’re working on new music? \n\n\n\nSaporiti: I never talk to anyone with a goal of anything. I just explore and hang out and talk to people like people\, and then if it comes up that they have an interesting story\, and they share that with me\, I might ask questions I’d ask anyone. If we’re having a drink at a bar\, I would talk to everyone the same way\, you know\, just be a good hang. That’s something they should lead off with [in] anthropology classes\, just be a good hang\, don’t needle people to relive their trauma. It’ll come out if it comes out. And if it doesn’t\, it doesn’t\, and that’s all right. That’s something I had to learn when I first started interviewing people for my No-No Boy project. I was talking to a lot of people who used to live in a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming during World War II\, and I would kind of right off the bat be like\, “Tell me about the worst three years of your life\,” which is a [expletive] up thing. Because\, as someone who comes from some really harsh family history\, you don’t want to define people by the worst parts of their life.  \n\n\n\nI’ve gone down and hung out in the Mexican camps across the border just to\, especially as a son of a refugee\, see what’s happening now and speak against it\, tell people what I’ve seen\, help out if I can. And it’s kind of up to [the refugees] what they want to share and just try to go in with a sense of reciprocity\, giving something first before you take something away from them\, which is their story.  \n\n\n\nI always bring down those Instax Polaroid cameras and just take pictures for people who have lost everything and having a picture of their kid means a lot to carry with them and then giving them the camera and a ton of film so they can take pictures of their friends. That little stuff\, that can mean a lot\, and then maybe you get some cool conversations and maybe that turns into art or songs\, but that’s really secondary.  \n\n\n\nEC: Your song “Little Monk” on [your third album] Empire Electric is inspired by your experience at Blue Cliff [Monastery]. How does that experience influence your music going forward? \n\n\n\nSaporiti: Pretty completely. My wife and I weren’t married at the time but we had started dating at Brown University. She had graduated with a sociology degree\, and I could leave campus because I was a PhD student\, and I had all my coursework done. And we just wanted to get out of there. When you’re 18 to 22\, you’re never more aware. You don’t have mortgages to pay yet or kids to worry about\, so that’s when the world really is spitting in your face the most\, and you notice it\, and you still have energy. Brown is a particularly liberal\, progressive\, activisty place\, and it was so scary to be there at that point in time\, because there were a lot of people just yelling about everything constantly and not really necessarily being informed about what they were yelling about. They were protesting everything but how rich those kids were\, never protests about economic class but everything else\, but with no substance behind it. I wanted calm in my life. I wanted the world to change. That’s why I went down to the Mexican border during a spring break to see these refugee camps for myself\, instead of just yelling about what people were yelling about on Facebook. I wanted to actually go see for myself and see if I could actually help out. \n\n\n\nThe monks will sort you out because they just don’t buy into that because there’s greater truths for them. That’s not to say they don’t acknowledge there’s pain and suffering in the world. That’s what Buddhism is about. It’s acknowledging suffering and trying to overcome it in your life. I felt like I was just angry and I felt a poison in me from all the politics in the world\, and all the suffering and [the monks] gave me tools to deal with that whether that was meditation or mindfulness stuff\, just walking around. And yeah\, that has sort of dictated my path. I don’t really use social media anymore. I’ll read the newspaper once a week instead of doom scroll constantly to see all the hell that’s happening because it’s not going to change in a week’s time. If I read one good article about the war over in the Middle East that’s going to be pretty thorough\, and I’ll catch up on what’s happened that week.  \n\n\n\nI think what I learned is to tend to your own garden. I don’t want to yell about what’s happening at a southern border if I’m being an [expletive] to my friend that week. That’s something I can help. I can help being present and helping someone else that I know and love instead of abstractly spinning out because the world is on fire. And also checking my own privilege\, right? I’m someone who has a PhD\, and makes a living doing art. I have a beautiful wife\, I have a roof over my head\, which has not always been the case in my life and\, talking about refugees\, is not the case for a lot of people now. The monks really helped me check my privilege and get out of that elite campus protester culture. They let me empty out and see that life is still wonderful for some people. For some people it’s not\, but for me\, it is\, and let me acknowledge that first and take solace and strength in that and then see how I can help the people in my community or if I do go somewhere where I can help. \n\n\n\nThis interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 
URL:https://emersoncontemporary.org/event/musician-julian-saporiti-approaches-refugee-storytelling-with-compassion/
CATEGORIES:Artist Spotlight,Artist Talk,Gallery Talk,News
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