Based in Chicago, b. 1996, VN/RUS, Interdisciplinary Performer. Nguyen incorporates disparate (and often clashing) material sources into forms that remain conceptually indeterminate, such as performance lectures, sound improvisation, and participatory sculptural interventions. Her favored materials include: speech fragments, mistranslations, painful sounds, urban recordings, sounds imitating nature sounds, breast pump parts, internet debris, and videos of daily life.
This project brings together influential voices from history that have been inherited solely, or largely, through tape recordings. Decades after the actual event of speech, these voices are received by us eternally etched with the hiss of tape and the static of transmission. In these particular recordings, voices that have left tangible marks on history are themselves marked by the passing of time.
James Baldwin (4’38”)
When asked by Mavis Nicholson to speak on homosexual love in 1987, writer James Baldwin shifts from the question of loving this or that person, to the question of loving anyone at all. For Baldwin, loving as such creates the intimate ties necessary for a functioning society. Through undulating layers of feedback, the cadence of Baldwin’s speech is transformed into a texture at once confidential and communal.
Hannah Arendt (6’03”)
In an interview with Günter Gaus in 1964, philosopher Hannah Arendt is asked to define political belonging with respect to love. In her view, love, which is personal and contingent, is separate from political belonging and organization. Her response is layered on itself with varying levels of feedback that oscillate between a single speaker and a crowd. As her voice builds on itself, different layers clash together in ever shifting constellations.
Side A: The Language of the Unheard; tape as distortion. Ho Chi Minh, Assata Shakur, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Luther King.
Side B: The Anguish over the Herd; tape as transmission. James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt.