Duration: 10 minutes 32’’
Tuan Mami, 2022
This moving-image work used/reproduced/composed photographs from Archive Massive in Spinnerei Art Space for Leipzig International Arts Program.
Immigrating Garden(no4) is a dialogue between a research about Vietnamese immigrated plants which travel with Vietnamese community to get into Germany and be so-called as illigal plants, and history of Leipzig Cotton Mill where the Spinnerie Gallery is located, that relearns the colony of German East Africa period in the 19th century which German stretched the cotton plantations across Africa to provide for their big textile companies in Europe. The two close look researches try to unlearn the hierarchies in structures of our politics, our powers, our benefits, and our social matters.
The moving image work ‘Can These Plants Invade and Destroy This Land?’ re-discovers different layers of migration in an archiving room to understand our long human journey, and see how plants become powerful and take important part in our history. It also tries to re-learn the impact and hidden aspects of colonization embedded into arts, histories and objects.
As a matter of politics, I see the plants as an actor navigating in the global world. Coming along with people who have been colonizers, invaders, investors, laborers, economic migrants, refugees, students etc., the plants participate actively in creating hierarchies in the system of our politics and our social matters. With this interdisciplinary research, I aim to create open-dialogues between the past and the present, the micro and macro histories, and especially between humans located in contradict positions of the power structure.
Looking into the history of German cotton plantation across East Africa in the 19th century, I want to examine how actually the cotton plants conquer the today global garment industry emerging from Europe. From such perspective, the Migrating Garden will raise questions on equality, humanity, and understanding towards our becoming-political system. On top of these issues, the question on ‘Is it enough to question?’ hinges over the project and opens up an uncertainty towards our future in the face of war and climate change.