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The City & The City, 2010
Video, length: 18, courtesy of the artists
Presentado por Hanoi Doclab, VietnamThe destructive character sees nothing permanent.
-Walter BenjaminEast by Southeast, Tokyo and Saigon share a history of destruction and occupation while also displaying various forms of shifting Asian urbanism. Modern warfare generated the radical conditions for architectural, political and social change in both cities, but how do we discover the traces of this shared history after intense postmodern re-imaginings concomitant with relentless construction of capitalist space? This video references China Mieville’s baroque urban fiction in an exploration of Tokyo and Saigon that operates on the mechanics of the ethnographic, the documentary, and the performative. Like Benjamin’s dense notations on modernity’s environments, the video accumulates in passages, splitting the screen in views of the cities’ urban topographies. How do we know the cities have changed, coming upon them like this? Do cities travel anywhere after time passes in vortexes of war, occupation, revaluation, demolition and ecstatic construction? The video fails to record the deep archaeology of Asia’s urbanism. Instead, fantastic cityscapes rendered in split minutiae emerge from Tokyo and Saigon’s strangely dissembled histories after modernism has fled.
- Bios
Hong-An Truong is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study program and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Most recent experimental pedagogical collaborations include The Gramsci Project with students at Laguardia Community College, New York (2010), and Acting the Words is Enacting the Worlds with Huong Ngo and students at EFA Project Space in New York (2011). Her work has been shown at Art in General, New York (2009), PAVILION, Bucharest (2010); the International Center for Photography, New York (2010), Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2010), Agape Enterprise, Brooklyn, New York (2012), Berrie Center for the Arts, New Jersey (2012), and Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila, Philippines (2012), among other venues. She is a current recipient of an Art Matters Foundation Grant (2012).
Artist Statement here: http://www.hongantruong.com/index.php?/statement/Dwayne Dixon is a PhD. candidate in the Dept. of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University where he is completing his dissertation on young people in Tokyo and their relations to urban space, changing economic conditions, and visual technologies.