Date: 06.03, 06.06, 06.08

Location: Sàn Art & the east bank of the Saigon River

Sàn Art is delighted to introduce entanglement on demolition debris, a collaborative project with the Asian Film Archive (AFA), taking inspiration from 7 video essays reflecting on changing geological and socio-political landscapes in the Monograph 2023 program, initiated by AFA, and our journey along the Eastern bank of Saigon River. 

Demolition debris is remnants of urban projects, and a place where temporality (temporally) pauses and life ceases to flourish if being approached from the timeline of progress. Entanglement or rooting, on the other hand, suggests an action of performing in time and signals of life. Following the path of root entangling on demolition debris, or to put in another way, perceiving other-than-human beings as historical actors amid an abandoned/unfinished urban project, we challenge perspectives that frame non-human beings as a backdrop for human socio-historical movements or perceive them as “primitive” creature that have no relations to human world-making projects.

Anchoring on moving-images and sound, media utilizing time as a material, this project aims to initiate new responses to landscapes. First is a walk through conceptual debris produced by film history to rethink the dynamic between human and nature as well as the slow violence of film representation. Next is a physical journey along the river’s bank to forage/unearth intertwined histories between human and non-human beings and reflect on actions of archiving and forgetting, remnants of violent displacement and opaque signs, or new forms of life co-created by the locals and non-human beings still dwelling and lingering on the landscape.