THE SPECTER OF ANCESTORS BECOMING
For the past four years, along with artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen and the majority of the Vietnamese-Senegalese community, RAW Material Company has been committed to bringing out of the shadows and shedding light on the stories of this community’s strong female figures - mothers and pillars of families that are an integral part of the Senegalese social fabric.
The Vietnamese-Senegalese community was built from the French colonial enterprise. In its evolution, love, courage, patience, solidarity, resistance as well as violence have been consequent parts of its formation.
In The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, Tuan Andrew Nguyen goes beyond this history and works in the space of memory, proposing not only an answer to the question “What might memory look like?” but more importantly “What might the memory of what has never been seen look like?”. Nguyen deals with the spaces of mourning and loss engendered by the silence of memory, and along with his collaborators in the film, makes the choice to remember.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen lives and works in Saigon, currently referred to as Ho Chi Minh City in Viet Nam.
His practice explores strategies of political resistance enacted through counter-memory and post-memory. Extracting and re-working narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and fiction are both held accountable in the present.