5 Questions with Victoria Pham & James Nguyen
Victoria Pham is an Australian archaeologist, artist and composer based in London. She is a PhD candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has been commissioned by a number of institutions such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and worked with a number of ensembles such as Gondwana Choirs and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
As an artist, she has featured in several festivals such as VIVID. As an archaeologist, her specialisation is in prehistoric archaeo-acoustics and cognitive evolution.
James Nguyen is an Asian-passing visual artist who has dabbled with painting, the practice of gambling, and conceptual art. Born in the highlands of Vietnam on a coffee plantation, he arrived in Australia under the family reunification program.
Nguyen completed a Bachelor of Pharmacy at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga before pivoting to arts institutions including the National Art School, Sydney College of the Arts and UNSW Art & Design. He is a current Gertrude Studio artist in Melbourne.
(Photograph: provided)
No.1
How did your collaboration, and consequently, the idea for RE:SOUNDING begin? Why the Đông Sơn drum?
The seed of the idea came from our parents and growing up as part of the Vietnamese diaspora. From hearing stories about these ancient bronze drums and how over time—through waves and waves of invasion, colonisation and war—these instruments were lost and dispersed elsewhere, like the diaspora itself.
The Đông Sơn drum continues to be an important symbol of Vietnamese national identity. References to them and their distinctive decorative motifs appear wherever Vietnamese people go. For example, there’s a large replica of the drum face on the corner of Chapel Rd and Greenfield Parade in Bankstown (NSW), and the archway at the Hoddle St intersection in Richmond (VIC) is based on the crane-like forms that decorate these drums. Although primarily originating from the village of Đông Sơn in Northern Vietnam, these drums were traded and were important cultural items throughout Southeast Asia, in that the exchange of these drums and the technology to cast them were shared and developed through trade routes that predated our post-colonial borders. The Karen people, the Hmong, tribes from Yunnan and Guangxi in China, and musicians in Indonesia (where these drums are called Gong Nekara) continue to use them to this day.
The irony is that, due to cultural looting and institutional sequestration by French archaeologists, and compounded by the inter-war trading of South-East Asian antiquities on the grey and black markets, many of these ancient instruments were absorbed into major ethnographic collections of museums and private collections in the west. So when we both encountered these instruments, we experienced them not as instruments, but as museum objects on display, which contrasted wildly with the vivid stories we heard as children.
The only way of dealing with this alienating impasse was by talking about these feelings of cultural loss and estrangement. And as if we conjured each other up through these conversations, our friend Kezia Yap introduced us over a coffee and we immediately started scheming about how we could take back these instruments.
No.2
You say in your email that you “seek to re-matriate and re-patriate” these objects from colonial museums. How did you manage to acquire the Đông Sơn drum you use, and how do you think you re-centered the provenance of the drum through RE:SOUNDING?
Our first instinct (we serendipitously acquired our drum through an auction house) was to consider repatriation. It quickly arose that repatriation involved not only the physical return of an object, but also by negotiating provenance to countries whose modern borders would not sit neatly with the ones we have inherited post-colonisation.
While doing research into established First Nations epistemologies and knowledge (Bennett 2019; Line 2018; Simpson 2019), we came across the term ‘rematriation’ which relates to the spiritual return of knowledge transcending the physical limits of a physical object. This term resonated with our search and desire to recover the historic social structures of Vietnam which was one of mixed matrilineal and double kinship family structures. This allowed us to critically consider that ownership of an object is not always about a patriarchal process of physical ownership, or simply receiving knowledge as a patronising conferment of cultural legitimacy through our colonial masters. It provoked a spiritual and academic connection that was generative and nuanced beyond the physical object as sites of lived knowledge.
Additionally, there is a tendency in the west to catalogue so-called old and ancient objects (this drum potentially being 3000 years old) as artefacts, where they are displayed to be seen but not heard. Our desire was to break the sound-barrier of colonisation and bring forth the voice of these objects in a way where contemporary audiences can engage with them not only as something ancient, but profoundly contemporary and part of our living language as musicians and artists. Listening became our method of rematriating and repatriating this instrument. Understanding our past through knowledge related to sound, music and performance allowed for a more unified experience of an object as part of ourselves and our communities, even if we are dispersed and separate across the globe.
No.3
There’s something to be said about merging the ‘old’ with the ‘new’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘contemporary’. By bringing together ancient history with the networked now, what do you hope to achieve or—at least, see—with this project?
There were different stages and perspectives in which we discussed the dialogue between the old and new. Foremost was the reality of working with an ancient instrument, a 2000- to 3000-year-old Đông Sơn drum. We did a lot of archival research, but what was most productive for us was seeking the wisdom of Melbourne-based musicologist Le Tuan Hung. His generational knowledge and access gave us a richer understanding of the drum and how it sat actively within Vietnamese culture and history. But ultimately, in order to “resound” it, we had to move beyond a purely historically-informed practice. So this came in several forms: we wanted to re-activate the drum as a digital tool, and consider how these sounds might be reinterpreted, remixed and re-imagined by contemporary musicians throughout the Indo-Pacific.
In response to the pandemic, we had to face the reality of digitising our entire project. While looking at new ways of exploring connection and presentation, we had to challenge how we would share and occupy space beyond the physical. Via our sound collection and commissions of new music, it highlighted how an object so old has spawned such a diverse selection of work from our network of friends and peers. Ultimately, RE:SOUNDING is all about engaging with Vietnamese history and culture through the lens of a single object and how this Đông Sơn drum can inspire new creation and experiences.
No.4
I read elsewhere that you also collaborated with Đà Lạt-based Vietnamese punk band Rắn Cạp Đuôi, and Indonesian musician Bagus Mazasupa. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
In thinking about the nature of rematriating the Đông Sơn Drum back to its original owners, we encountered difficulties when it came to provenance. Although it’s an object that symbolises ancient Vietnamese culture, bronze drums of similar style and technology are located and infused in the music of Southeast Asia, particularly those in Indonesia. As a result, we expanded our community of musicians we wanted to create music with, ending up by commissioning new work (with samples taken from our drum) from Bagus Mazasupa and Rắn Cạp Đuôi.
Their responses broadened our musical palette and were such different approaches, interpretations and processes to music-making that we were used to. In a modern context, it reinforces the notion that a single object does not have a singular function. Historically, the drum itself was used for rituals associated with fertility, harvest, and agriculture; but it was also used to unite warring tribes against common enemies and invaders. In this sense, our modern collection of drum sounds focused on exploring musical and experimental approaches to sound that enabled this project to equally embody the multiplicity of contemporary music-making behind historically-informed practices, as well as its existence in our imagination as a living instrument. Why can’t it be in the realm of electronic music or sound art, and shared by a diverse group of living musicians? Working with Rắn Cạp Đuôi with their love of noise, rock, and distortion and Bagus Mazasupa with his experience in electronic textures and keyboard performance, has expanded the musical return of the Đông Sơn Drum and widened the diversity of contemporary communities engaging with this instrument.
No.5
How do you intend to preserve the continuity of this project in the long run? Any plans to take RE:SOUNDING further, or to work with more instruments?
We hope to continue accruing an archive of sound recordings, new music and knowledge around these drums. We hope that we will be able to work with more institutions over time to work towards implementing new policies and approaches that will open up more instruments like these to their specific communities and artists.
While working on the project, we were talking with one of our mentors Joel Spring and some others about a potential “collective raiding of the museum.” Perhaps one day we can start our own pre-colonised orchestras and come together to play the instruments of our ancestors. Hearing each other’s knowledge and just jamming to create our own sonic dialogues together.
What has been really interesting is finding out that museums in reality lack the human resources and imaginative capacity to invest in these instruments as sources of shared knowledge. Why is it that governments can invest in keeping the traditions of western musical practices alive through chamber, Classical, and Baroque orchestras, while locking our musical traditions up in the display cabinet? Really, these museums should be returning these instruments into the hands of young and emerging practitioners who will gain the capacity to become specialist players of these ancient instruments—akin to the existing loan-system for million-dollar Stradivarius violins—and who they are willing to entrust and invest the time in to keep a specific musical tradition alive. We want to take our cultural instruments on tour and connect the multiple and fractured collections of these museums like we would a library, rather than consign all our objects to static display.
Imagine, travelling the world together, and going on tour as an ex-colonised orchestra to recover the sounds of our ancestral instruments from the museum!
(Above: Victoria Pham; below: James Nguyen)
RE:SOUNDING is the feature project of BLEED (20 July – 2 August). New work and content will be going live throughout these dates.