THE SPEAKING PLACE

In Poetics of Relation, philosopher Édouard Glissant argues for a "right to opacity" as a challenge to the dominance of transparency and legibility, suggesting the right to not be fully understood and defined, embracing the complexity and unknowability of global human experiences. In Vietnamese linguistics, how might we locate forms of speaking and writing that do not define, taxonomize, or claim, but rather that we live in and inhabit? Where do we locate a space in which the Vietnamese language can evade capture, and instead, rustle and wander?

The Speaking Place embraces the decolonial, ontological turn towards the right to linguistic opacity, or as Gilles Deleuze might encourage, to “set the word aflame,” especially in a postcolonial condition where he and Guattari note: “... there is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language.” Through the works of Danh Võ, Hương Ngô, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Phạm Ngọc Dương, Trương Tân, Ưu Đàm Trần Nguyễn, this exhibition proposes the unknowability and untranslatability of Vietnamese cultural and linguistic histories—written, oral, and poetic. With works spanning across temporalities, geographies, and media, each channeling insurgent linguistic histories, The Speaking Place finds generative space within obscurity, refusal, and encryption, positing the visual languages of Vietnamese artists as an alternative mode of communication, connection, and understanding.

-Sofia Thiệu D’Amico

References:
Don Mee Choi, Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), tr. 5-6.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, dịch Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (Columbia University Press, 1990), 89.