Timeframe: 2008 - mid-2010
How are processes of censorship lived and felt as a consequence of historical memory? How can the principle of revolution be peacefully determined as a collective space of social change in societies whose cultural, political voice is restricted by the state? How are traumatic events of the past used as political strategies in order to control social communities? Are the perceived imaginings of a cultural memory or trauma exacerbating or nurturing the limits by which a society can heal, move on from a particular historical moment? What is the relationship between culture, art, and education in re-determining social agency?
Initiated by the Long March Project, the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son) project aimsto be a collaborative contemporary art project in the implementation of artistic and educational activities that are mutually sustainable between China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Seeking creative and intellectual breakthroughs that challenge preconceived ideas of the past, re-interpreting ideas of cultural stereotype, racial prejudice and the subconscious effects of geographical imposed divide, this project aims to imaginatively ¡®move¡¯ the Long Mountain Range (the region in which the Ho Chi Minh Trail exists), to provoke the complex memories of this region, by referring to this route as a metaphorical framework and departure point for discussion.
Background
The Long March Project began as an artistic investigation of the grand narrative and historical consciousness determined in the wake of, and resulting mythologizing, of China¡¯s revolutionary Long March of 1934-36. This historical pathway was re-traced by the Long March Project in 2002, serving not only as a geographical route, but also symbolic of a much larger philosophical and ideological pursuit engaging ideas behind the process of writing, remembering and recreating a cultural history, revolutionary memory and the struggle to articulate motivations evoked in individual and collective action. There are many similar historical journeys that represent the resilience of the human spirit and though they are fraught with their own agendas and traumatic consequences, they are important cultural memories to which the possibility of a future is informed and can be given birth.
Rationale
It is in this vein that the full context of the Ho Chi Minh Trail can also offer a metaphorical point of departure for artistic and educational discussion and imaginative collaboration. To take Vietnam as an example, successive Chinese dynasties had political, economical and cultural connections with Vietnam in its early history. This country¡¯s independence was under continual challenge, subsequently taken by the French in the late 19th Century, forming part of Cochin China along with much of the Mekong Delta region, to be later problematized by the Japanese and the US (indirectly by China and Russia). Today, China and Vietnam is entering a new phase of understanding and cooperation, spurred by common historical and geographical metaphors of political colonialism; the historical and social consequence of immigration on economic and cultural platforms at home and abroad and many more complex realities that offer a multi-layered set of meanings for defining contemporary ideas of society. Where is the everyday experience anchored in Vietnam today? What drives the direction of its progress?
The Ho Chi Minh Trail, though internationally understood as a logistical supply route created during the Second Indochina War (1969-74), formed a vast network of passageways across China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This rhizomic map serves as a reflection of the fraught, interconnected, influential, overlapping histories of the region. This particular area was the strategic battleground between the two Communist powers of China and the Soviet Union during the Second Indochina War. China¡¯s decision to support Vietnam during this time was instrumental to Mao Zedong¡¯s domestic argument to gather the masses against Imperialist forces encroaching its national borders (eg. USA). This strategic decision not only internationally presented China¡¯s support for revolutionist forces in Vietnam, but also encouraged Mao¡¯s domestic grand plans for ¡®The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution¡¯. Going back even further in time, the complex tale of conquest (eg. Kublai Khan¡¯s attempt to invade Vietnam in the 13th Century; or Vietnam¡¯s occupation of the People's Republic of Kampuchea in the 1980s); of cultural and intellectual exchange (eg. vassal relationship between the Cham Dynasty of Vietnam with China), to name but a few historical examples, some of which are to this day remembered with a significant and prolonged cultural animosity.
This project seeks to engage the varying contexts of perspective from the artistic and educational communities within these countries, their stories pivotal to an overall understanding of the metaphorical legacy of this trail as a divergent journey, drawing relevant and pertinent comparisons with broader international movements of social thought, strategy and intervention.
Can such events of the past be objectively re-written, re-interpreted so as to confront, alleviate, or alter an understanding of historical consciousness? How can sensitive misgivings between cultural and social communities be creatively engaged so as to create new identifications, new possibilities of beneficial engagement where psychological and social prejudices are laid aside?? How has the historical exchange of knowledge and ideas created, supported, or spurned a sense of mutual imaginings? There are many different interpretations of these variable histories, to which visual art, maps and texts, to name but a few material examples, offer important and significant comparison.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son) project will continue the international journey of the Long March Project, a journey that has so far been realized as a conceptual, philosophical and physical examination of the relationship between past, present and future; between an understanding of assumption, stereotype and identity; between creation, production and market. The Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son) project extends this contemporary campaign of critical discourse surrounding art and culture, investigating the potential common threads and divergent perspectives on lived and felt experience, and aims to be a progressive artistic and educational exercise built on the value of process and exchange, rather than an assumed investment in result and subsequent object making (though undoubtedly an inherent part of the process).
This project aims to involve multiple individuals (visual artists, writers, historians, film makers, performers, musicians etc), artistic organizations and institutions (public and private) from across this region and its diaspora. Discussions, lectures, public forums, informal screenings of historical and contemporary visual material, new art works, performances, new imaginings, new texts - all will be created, shared, exhibited, documented, and distributed, in the spirit of artistic exchange that is recognized as foundationally paramount to the crucial relationship between culture and contemporary society.
This project aims to bring creative individuals in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Luang Prabang and Beijing into closer working proximity. The emphasis for this project is on process, and the need to build productive ongoing relationships and partnerships. All outcomes will be documented and placed online (www.longmarchspace.com). An external advisory committee is in development.
Research and development of this project began in November 2007 by the Director of International Programs, during a three-month residency in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, with thanks to Asialink Australia.
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