British Council project
In 2023, the AVA launched “Well Settled: Activating the An Việt Archives” using a grant from the British Council, as part of its UK-Vietnam season designed to foster connection and spark collaboration between Britain and Vietnam. The project aims to carve out a new model for how shared heritage can be made accessible, and set the foundation for collectively building a new digital multilingual heritage, culture and educational hub.
This project, which started in March 2023, explores ‘shared heritage’ through the lenses of sound, art and community network-building. This was as much about seeking inspiration from the past as laying the foundation for future collaborations. With artistic responses from more than 40 creatives, musicians, 3D mappers and designers, we have been able to demonstrate for the first time the breadth and depth of the unseen collections.
Future activity includes working with 3D scanning specialist Keren Kuenberg to create an augmented reality model of the Old Bath House building, the home of the AVF. It will be populated by archival and community memories of its life from 1981-2017. We also plan to have a public billboard outside the Old Bath House that will tell the story of the Vietnamese community in the area through materials from the AVA. Watch this space.
What do we mean by ‘activating’?
When we think of archives, we typically think of dusty and stale bookshelves, and row upon row of numbered catalogues that require reading with a magnifying glass. They are also often thought of as “institutional” – and by nature of that exclusive. Our project offers opportunities for the public to interrogate and go beyond that definition, working with entrusted groups – whether they be institutions or otherwise – to shape how the archive is catalogued and develop a new model for what an archive can be. In the spring/summer of 2023 we invited people to join us for two ‘collective archiving’ workshops in this vein on site at Hackney Archives. Both occasions were about interacting with the archive material in an intimate, safe space and seeing any connections and resonances unfold. We heard many personal stories about the British-Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora experience.
There were also smaller group discussions at Hackney Archive involving AVASP member Cường, plus 40 people from the diasporic Vietnamese community, who responded in their own time to elements from the archive. They sat with their selected items and then spoke about how they would personally “tag” the item, reflecting on its significance in a voice note. So, instead of seeing the cataloguing process as something static and circumscribed, this community archiving was designed to keep the symbolism of each item in our collection very much an open question.
We invited artists in the UK and Vietnam to activate the collection through new commissioned projects supported by Lưu Chữ, Á Space, Hackney Archive, AVF and University of Westminster.
Exhibition of commissioned works at LUX Moving Image Gallery, London
(November 4 – December 16, 2023)
We kicked off the second round of our British Council funding partnership with an exciting exhibition of commissioned artist works at LUX. For half a century, LUX has served as a UK agency for the support and promotion of artists working with the moving image. In the summer of 2016, LUX relocated to Waterlow Park, Highgate after 14 years in Hackney. Its variety of exhibition spaces, library, archive and educational rooms was wonderfully suited to the Well Settled project, in which experimental artworks and contemporaneous community engagement create new sensations and imaginaries from the historic legacy of the archives.
The artists and guests gathered to celebrate the opening at LUX on November 4, with a live performance from Aidan Marsden as part of Moi Tran’s piece (production and sound effects by Sasha Ilyukevich). The multi-media pieces used the AVA as a springboard and we give you a flavour of what was accomplished below:
You can read more about the project on on LUX’s website.
More photos from archive launch and communication can be found here on our social media.
Photo Credit: Hsi Lun Chen
Exhibition documentation
Photo credit: Courtesy of LUX.
The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust by George Clark, academic, artist and AVA steering panel member. Central to this project has been following the constitution of the An Việt Archives in London:
“The film explores the collective labour of archives connected to the dispersed history of Vietnam. In their work to care for images, documents and fragments, collections not only preserve the past but also create new ways for places and people to be imagined. Working with a community archive in Hackney and a state film archive in Hanoi, the film explores the often invisible work involved in preserving such imaginaries.”
George Clark
Night of the 30th / Đêm Ba Mươi by Nhà Sàn Collective, a group of independent creatives and network initiated by a group of artist friends based in Hanoi. It is one of the leading artist-run spaces in Vietnam with over 10 years of supporting artists and developing innovative projects across the country and beyond.
“This moving image work was filmed at the residence of Mr. Manh Duc, a home in close proximity to the collective and their community of artist friends for many years. In this playground, a mystical world emerges; a cinema is reenacted. As the film unfolds, a river, a garden, spirits, wooden structures, people and objects appear, dissolve and reappear, as if they were characters morphing into one another.”
Nhà Sàn Collective
The Lost Buffalo and Sister Imposter: The reimagining of a tale by Moi Tran, artist, cultural worker, designer and educator.
“[This] experiment exercises a process of analogue encoding / decoding to conjure up drawings, text, microfilm documents and visual scores for sonic improvisation in a constellation of speculative communication.”
Moi Tran
Get more information in the exhibition booklet here.