Where We Are: When the Storm Comes? is a collaboration between feminist publishers Gantala Press and Bar de Force Press. This project is an attempt at documenting everyday life and feminist responses to being locked down or surveilled, as part of our respective country’s solutions to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gathered here are projects that question and critique the rhetoric of resiliency and the strategies of discipline, silencing, and censorship that pervade the so-called New Normal for both the Philippines and Vietnam.
When speaking of revolution, we often forget to mention the many moments of waiting and merely surviving. Experiencing the mundane means that you have survived another day – there is nothing to report because you have evaded surveillance.
– Hương Ngô, We are still here / Chúng ta vẫn ở đây / Narito pa rin kami
Neen Sapalo
Nang huminto ang mundo
Neen Sapalo is a teacher, researcher, and anthropologist-in-training. Her work reflects her interest in political economy, cultural studies, and subaltern notions of home, space, and human rights.
The time capsule she compiled for us consists of conversations, receipts from transactions for new equipment she and her fellow teachers needed to buy for their online classrooms, along with photographs, news items, and memes that help describe the conditions in which they are now forced to work.
TRƯƠNG QUẾ CHI
Tiểu sử một năm
Trương Quế Chi works in Hanoi in both visual art and cinema, as an artist, a curator and a lecturer. Her works begin along the borders between cinema, visual art, performance, literature, architecture and sound — a search for a landscape, a mise-en-scène, in relation to space-time.
Since 2015 Quế Chi has been part of the curatorial board of Nhà Sàn Collective, a Vietnamese artist-run initiative as well as lecturing at the Hanoi University of Theatre and Cinema. Her works have been featured at various local and international film festivals, exhibitions, and symposiums, including Site/Shine/Sight, duo show with architectural studio vn-a, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Vietnam (2018), When I stop by the Cape, solo show, Nhà Sàn Collective, Vietnam (2017); Cosmopolis #1, Centre Pompidou, France (2017); Asian Film Focus: Time Machine, Objectifs–Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2017); Skylines with Flying People 3, Nhà Sàn Collective, Vietnam (2015-2017); South by Southeast. A Further Surface, Times Museum, China (2016); Oberhausen International Film Festival, Germany (2015); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Gaité Lyrique, Paris, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2015); and Torino Film Festival, Italy (2014).
Quế Chi’s work pans out in the format of a multi-axis comic that can be read and interacted with from different angles, centering around a block of substance.
Photo credit: Đạt Vũ
Rural Women Advocates
Payak na dahilan
RUWA was formed as a volunteer arm for AMIHAN – a federation of peasant women organizations that carries forward the call for genuine agrarian reform, national industrialization, and an end to all forms of exploitation and discrimination especially against women in the countryside.
AMIHAN was established on October 26, 1986 as a response to the need to give a collective voice to the peasant women, the most numerous and discriminated, yet the largest sector of women in the Philippines.
The documentation of workshops and banners collected in this series show how the organization has used needle and thread as a tool for sewing/sowing dissent.
NGUYỄN THÚY HẰNG
Chiếc lưỡi lợn
Nguyễn Thúy Hằng was born in Saigon and graduated from the University of Fine Arts – Saigon. She is one of the few outstanding artists from the post-war generation, both in literature and visual arts of Vietnam. Her first trilogy, Current Times, Good Sensations, and Reasonable Insanity, written during a two-year adventure in the US, was published by Knowledge Publisher and Young Publisher, Hanoi, 2006, and became a phenomenon in the country.
On Return to Vietnam in 2005, Hằng moved to Hanoi where she held a solo exhibition, The Gang, a sculpture installation at VietArt Centre; and completed We Haven’t Been Able to Sleep, published by Knowledge Publisher and Literature Publisher, Hanoi, 2008, and They – The Powder of The Illusory, published by Nha Nam, Hanoi, 2013. Her most remarkable solo exhibition is a large-scale sculpture installation, The Warrior, supported by CDEF Denmark Embassy and Post Vidai Collection, Saigon, 2015. In 2017, her solo exhibition Histoire d’un Voyage: Sand in my ears, adrift of the world was presented by The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Saigon, to show the process of writing and producing books as a critical part of her artistic practice. In the same year, she also released the Three Authors, Vietnamese Contemporary Literature, published by Vagabond Press, Asia Pacific, Australia. Her literary publications also appear in Singapore Art Book Fair and are in the collections of the Hong Kong Library Museum and Taiwan Contemporary Art Museum.
Nguyễn Thúy Hằng’s works often combine various art and forms: large-scale sculpture installation and contemporary dance, cinema and fine arts, music. She is currently working in Saigon.
Conchitina Cruz
Remote
Conchitina Cruz teaches creative writing and literature at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Her books of poetry include Dark Hours, elsewhere held and lingered, and There is no emergency. She is a member of Rural Women Advocates (RUWA), and she helps run the small press expo Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX).
Remote was conceived as a response to our call for artifacts that encapsulate this tenuous moment, in which Philippine educators are being called to shift their classrooms to online platforms. In the full text, Cruz draws parallels between the feelings of isolation that come with observing life from her apartment window, alongside observing life from the window of a computer screen.
HƯƠNG NGÔ
We are still here
Hương Ngô (Huong Ngo, Ngô Ngọc Hương, 吳玉香) is an artist born in Hong Kong, often working between France and Vietnam, and currently based in Chicago where she is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Having grown up as a refugee in the American South, she engages histories of colonialism and migration, particularly in relationship to language, structures of power, and ideologies. The body and, alternately, its absence and its traces are strongly present in her work, which often asks how we might make visible the process of our own subject formation. Beginning her studies as a biology major, she received her BFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001) and continued in Art & Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2004).
Her research and archive-based practice began while a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012. She was recently awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) to realize a project, begun at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in France, recently exhibited at DePaul Art Museum (2017), and continued through the Camargo Core Program (2018), that examines the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons. Her work, described as “deftly and defiantly decolonial” by New City and “what intersectional feminist art looks like” by the Chicago Tribune, has exhibited at the MoMA, MCA Chicago, Nhà Sàn Collective, and Para Site and supported by 3Arts, Chicago Artists Coalition, DCASE, and Sàn Art, among others.
In this publication, Hương Ngô will deploy words to peel off the layers of her experience as a practicing artist amidst a global pandemic, the histories of femininity and feminism through the refugee lens, and the nodes of connection between her personal voyage and that of Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, a revolutionary figure of Vietnam – all will be conveyed and liaised through the visual medium of an exhibition staged in Saigon.
Photo credit: Nathan Keay for New City Chicago
Gantala Press
Makibaka
Gantala Press is a feminist small press and literary collective based in Manila, Philippines, and co-founded by writer, Faye Cura.
Cura’s needlepoints that form Makibaka were originally conceptualized as a series of soft books and cloth zines that would be exhibited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines this year in response to the unveiling, or removal from the banned books library and launch into public view, of the Valerio Nofuente archives.
The cloth zines and booklets in this series explore the materiality of books and the acts of writing or inscribing; the ideas of art production and reproduction; and the accessibility of language.
Where We Are: When the Storm Comes? was made possible by a local grant from the Japan Foundation Manila Office
Translations from English to Vietnamese and Vietnamese to English by Hung M. Duong; translations from Filipino to English by Alice Sarmiento, translations from English to Filipino by Faye Cura, Leslie Corpuz, and Alice Sarmiento.
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