Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon
Schedule
Tue Nov 19 2024 at 06:00 pm
UTC-08:00Location
328 Lomita Dr, Stanford, CA, United States, California 94305 | Stanford, CA
For multiple generations, the residents of Quảng Trị on the North Central Coast of Vietnam have lived with the physical residue and lingering trauma of war, in one of the most heavily bombed areas in the history of modern warfare. The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon explores the ways in which material contains memory and holds potential for transformation, reincarnation, and healing.
The film centers around a woman named Nguyệt, who is the lone caretaker for her mother and their scrapyard business. The labor is backbreaking and tedious but she manages to do it alone. As a reprieve from her life, Nguyệt makes beautiful hanging sculptures from bomb scraps that look almost exactly like Alexander Calder’s work. Nguyệt soon realizes that she's the reincarnation of Calder—famous for his kinetic sculptures and very outspoken against the war in Vietnam. But what would it mean that she's now making those sculptures, using bomb material in Vietnam?